Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Page 88

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
As to the politics of biennials, we have discussed the capacity of biennials to offer mod-
els of resistance, expose contradictions within epistemologies, and provide platforms
for countering various forms of dominance. We have also detailed claims according to
which biennials tend to reproduce hegemonies through their art practices and political
economies. Probing the biennials’ cultural political economies, we showed that they are
intimately linked to the dynamics of capital accumulation and production of monetary
value within the current capitalist model. However, not only economic but also symbol-
ic, cultural as well as political capital, can be generated through biennials. They can thus
be connected to other regimes of value than commercial value. The idea of multiple,
co-implicated spatialities and ways of being political also suggests that the persistence
of national framings or hegemonic connections does not mean that biennials cannot be
something else at the same time. Foregrounding such heterotopic character of biennials
can also offer a way out of polarized interpretations, which see biennials either as global
spaces of diversity and resistance or as examples of the way in which neoliberal capital-