ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the biennial as a practice bound up with academic knowledge and marketing; resistant cultures, social movements and Marxist theory; and neoliberal economic processes, city branding and urban development. It is concerned with the production of speech, practice and moral standpoints in and about contemporary art biennials through a discursive framework founded in the conjunction of art, critical theory and promises for social intervention. The new, post-1990s biennial consists of an effort to reach out and approach new social subjects, extending from activists and new social movements to disenfranchised communities and contemporary social theorists, rather than merely the field of art connoisseurs. The new biennial draws on certain historical precedents and its rise relies on certain socio-economic conditions. One of the most recurrent and persisting frameworks employed to speak about the phenomenon of art biennials refers to the idea of ‘biennialisation’.
