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hegemony of established art institutions and Western art history ( O ’ Neill 2012:85 ; see also Marchart 2013 ).
Thus , for many scholars the fact that biennials have been firmly tied to hegemonic structures does not mean that it would be impossible to use them to advance other agendas . Okwui Enwezor claims that biennials are still able to expose the limits and contradictions of Western epistemologies . Being aware of the fact that an expansionist mode of biennials has given rise to a negative impression of biennials as “ an agora of spectacle ” ( Enwezor 2010 [ 2010 ]: 434 ), he claims that biennials may enable a transformation of spectatorship toward a less possessive direction ( Enwezor 2010 [ 2010 ]: 441 ). Enwezor is thus among the scholars claiming that the “ globalization ” of the phenomenon of biennials can be made to signal a process of fragmentation and that this can unhinge totalizing notions of art and culture . Understood in the wider context of feminism , multiculturalism , liberation theology , resistance art , queer theory , and rights of indigenous peoples , the hegemonic concept of spectatorship becomes fragmentary and is replaced by the idea of “ general spectatorship ”, which is tied to neither the logic of the nation state nor that of imperialism ( Enwezor 2010 [ 2010 ]: 442 – 444 ).
Curiously , participation at the Venice Biennale can be interpreted as a counter-hegemonic act as such . An example of this is offered in Wei ’ s analysis of the Taiwanese pavilion . After being symbolically diminished from the status of an official national pavilion to a collateral event at the Venice Biennale in 2003 , the function of the pavilion changed . Instead of representing Taiwanese art and making the public familiar with Taiwan , representing a “ critical perspective ” became the main function of the Taiwanese unofficial , self-proclaimed pavilion ( Wei 2013:475 – 481 ). In Wei ’ s words , it “ critiques the logic of cultural , political and economic hegemony dominating the biennale and caus [ ing ] Taiwan ’ s own marginality ”, acting as a device of critical globalism ( Wei 2013:483 ). Arguably , the case of the Taiwanese pavilion shows that the non-Western participants and the “ oppressed ” are not passive , hegemony-obeying victims , but can also use the existing structures to advance their own agendas 7 ( Wei 2013:474 – 484 ).
From the point of view of an analysis of the politics of space of contemporary art biennials , Simon Sheikh ’ s interpretation of the possibility of biennials to function as sites of resistance is particularly interesting . Sheikh recognizes that a residue of national myth-making and production of citizenry is at work in biennials and that they are intimately tied to processes of capital accumulation . However , he claims that things start to look different if we examine them through the prism of interconnectedness — the sense of any place being always seen in relation to another place , or a series of possible places : “ What goes on ‘ here ’ always has effects ‘ there ’, and vice versa , even when we are not aware of these movements . ... [ O ] ne of the characteristics of advanced art is precisely that it allows one to see more than one viewpoint : more than one story or situation , and
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In short , relational understanding of space suggests that types of associations and relations between entities precede identities ( Massey 2005 ).
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