ABSTRACT
An exhibition form that was ‘threatening to slide into neoliberal conform ism’, as the organisers of the second edition of the World Biennial Forum note in 2014, ‘has again become the site of conflict and controversy’. A largely polemical structure of feeling in counter-biennial articulations, threatening the biennial form with a kind of legitimacy crisis, rose concurrently with anti-austerity and Occupy movements appearing in European and international landscapes. The identification of a gap between words and actions and the demand for increased truthfulness evolves amidst a process of shifting values in the context of rising social movements within the public spheres of Europe. Social movement cultures provide the grounds where certain values spring, develop and possibly stream in social settings. The vocabulary circulating on the social movements shares intellectual affinities with incipient ways of thinking about art, exhibitions and biennials, taking place within art circuits at around the same period.
