Introduction: Origin Stories

The Bienal de La Habana was founded in 1984 as a survey of art from Latin America and the Caribbean. But in 1986 and then again in 1989 its remit was progressively broadened to include artists from further afield, from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. For Gerardo Mosquera, one of the Bienal's curatorial leaders, the remodelings created a new, international axis of artistic exchange among cultures that were not aligned to the First or the Second Worlds.¹ But, as we shall show in this chapter, this was not exactly new. The Bienal de La Habana was the latest in a long series of concerted attempts by cultural institutions to challenge the US–USSR binary of Cold War antipathy that froze other regions out. These exhibitions for the most part refused to align with that binary, instead seeking other modes of exchange along South–South artistic axes. The focus of this chapter is therefore on the South–South history of biennials preceding those in Havana in the decades prior to the 1980s.

Such alliances of the “non-aligned” were endeavors to generate an alternative global cultural network to that of the long-established exhibitions of Venice, documenta, and even São Paulo. Indeed, the Bienal de La Habana sought to develop ties between non-aligned cultures of the Third World and the South. Its curators consciously chose not to exhibit art made in Europe and North America in favor of exclusively selecting art from other regions of the world, thereby framing the Bienal with a distinctive, postcolonial rhetoric and refusing the long-established model, inherited from the Venice Biennale, of representation by nation. The Bienal developed the ties between its participating artists by encouraging short-term, celebratory art collaborations and emphasizing a dialogue and debate that was actualized in the proliferations of forums, residencies, and carefully encouraged, convivial, informal gatherings, especially at the Bienal bars – or officially designated “meeting places” – that dotted Havana by the end of the 1980s, which had been designed precisely for such inter-collegial networking. (And they were necessary, given the overcrowded, under-catered nature of Havana's few cafes accessible to international visitors at the time.) The Havana Bienals were landmark exhibitions.

Despite this clear status as landmark, though, we should recognize that biennials based on South–South dialogue had been held since at least 1955 around the world; the 1979 Biennale of Sydney had previously completely dispensed with representing nations by artists and it had actively immersed its artist visitors in dialogues, encounters, and convivial networking as well. The Bienals de La Habana were not the first biennials to make these innovations, but they managed all of this at once and, unlike Sydney and São Paulo, did not aspire to represent nor be ambassadors for the avant-gardes of Europe and North America. And why is Havana remembered as a breakthrough, while Delhi's Triennale-India is more or less forgotten? Because the third Bienal de La Habana in 1989 opened at a crucial moment, as the Cold War that had so shaped the biennials of the South quickly wound down amidst conservative claims such as Francis Fukuyama's about the “end of history,” the end of ideological conflict, following the collapse of European communism and the supposed triumph of Western capitalist democracy.² At the same time, the slow-gathering rise of cultural globalization, empowered by a matrix of intellectual, technological, and business innovations, was still only grudgingly shifting its spotlight away from the North Atlantic region. Even the term, Third World, so central during earlier decades, now faded away in favor of the less loaded word, South.

What we want to suggest in this chapter is that another view of exhibitions and their histories emerges if we approach the subject of biennials differently. To be more specific, the lineage of biennials shifts when seen not from the perpetually insistent demands of the North, but from the viewpoints and aspirations of the South.³ And by “South,” we mean something more than either the geographical mappings of the Southern Hemisphere or the geoeconomic contours of the “global South” as a category of economic deprivation. While the notion of “South” can certainly encompass these terrains, it also asserts the histories of colonialism that coexist and are shared throughout the world: what Santiago-based curator Beatriz Bustos Oyanedel called “these dark periods … embodied in absences and suffering” that ties the settler to the indigenous in ways distinct from the heavy hand of distant imperial headquarters, and which is not limited to early modern colonialism or its settler migrations but equally pertains to the more recent colonial incursions of neoliberal economics and its international relations.⁴ And while historical reflection is central to the South, it does not exclude the significance of constructive initiatives generated out of and in defiance of these histories: that is, the web of potentialities that can connect and be coordinated across the cultures of the South, emphasizing “South” as “a direction as well as a place,” to cite historian Kevin Murray, and as a zone of agency and creation, not simply poverty and exploitation.⁵ Pan-Arabism and Négritude are amongst the powerful terms that have sought to encompass these directions, but there are numerous others as well, with culture playing a significant role in defining and entrenching these new social relations.

This chapter is thus guided by a series of questions that opens up a much-needed reimagining of the histories of exhibitions across the globe in recent decades. What might a Southern perspective of biennials look like? What agitations or alternatives might that perspective pose for the histories of these exhibitions as we have come to know them thus far? Or does the narrative remain in effect the same no matter which direction it faces? We do not presume to address all the nuances in these questions: given its sheer eclecticism, a Southern history of biennials may prove impossible to conscript into a linear narrative. It is nonetheless clear that these still largely occluded histories do not quite fit the habitual framings of biennials as beginning with a first wave at the close of the nineteenth century and segueing neatly into the neo-imperial tidal force of the 1990s and 2000s. They instead coincide with what we consider to be a second wave of biennialization that developed from the 1950s into the 1980s, and which insisted upon a self-conscious, critical regionalism as the means for realigning cultural networks across geopolitical divides. This is a very different story to that of the rise of the biennial star-curator, which we described in chapter 1, and the work of directing and assembling these biennials often as not occurred in teams.

A Brief History of Southern Biennials

Where might these histories begin? If the usual narratives find their origins in the 1890s, or in the 1955 debut of documenta and its aim to rehabilitate the art and urban development of postwar West Germany, then perhaps we, too, will start in 1955: but on the southern edges of the Mediterranean Sea, in Alexandria, and the development of one of the first regionally oriented biennials, the Biennale de la Méditerranée. This narrative would still sustain the reassuring sensation of familiarity for biennial aficionados for, much like the exhibitions in Venice or São Paulo, Alexandria's biennial divided its participants and presentations according to national origin, with selections determined by (for the most part, consular) officials from each of the nations involved. Moreover – and, again, like its Venetian or Kassel counterparts – this biennial sought to use the display of recent art as the means to loop back to a glorious era of local art production so as to resurrect the city's international and cultural status. In this case, that was the third century BCE when Alexandria was “the beacon of the Arts, the center of thinking, the homeland of Philosophy,” according to the preface by the biennial's General Commissioner, Hussein Sobhi.⁶

Politics were central to this vision, too, for the Biennale de la Méditerranée was also designed to commemorate the third anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution that eventually swept Gamal Abdel Nasser – the biennial's chief patron – to the country's presidency. Yet while Nasser would later promote a pan-Arab agenda as the cornerstone of his political philosophies, it was a Mediterranean regionalism that was the force driving the first Alexandrian biennial. Such a Mediterraneanist focus was, of course, not new to the region itself (given the histories of the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman empires), but it was a different model for presenting a biennial. Rather than foreground competition between artists from different countries and cultures – most obviously through the awarding of prizes to specific artists, which in Venice, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere had often resulted in bitter and jealous rivalries as much as arbitrary determinations of “quality” – Alexandria's biennial sought (at least rhetorically) “a certain provision for artistic co-operation” among its participants, who came from the full circumference of the Mediterranean Sea: from Egypt, Spain, Greece, France, Italy, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, and Syria, with artists from Albania, Morocco, and Tunisia joining the roster in 1957.⁷ On one level, this “artistic co-operation” would (or so the biennial's organizers hoped) reveal a “common denominator [that] is properly Mediterranean,” an aesthetic rapprochement that could cross different cultural traditions.⁸ But we should also remember that 1955 was the very height of the Cold War. Bringing together artists from both sides of the Iron Curtain, as well as from countries subject to post-fascist dictatorships, isolationism, and despair, was no small feat. For Sobhi, in particular, regionalism would be a way to break through those geopolitical divisions, ensuring that “the biennial will re-establish friendly relations between Mediterranean countries.”⁹ And while it would be easy to perceive the biennial and its regionalist ambitions as little more than a pawn in Nasser's identity politics, such a view tends to ignore the significance that regionalism has played in the development and wake of liberation and independence movements. Indeed, if the catalogue for the second Biennale de la Méditerranée is anything to go by, with its frequent references to liberation and new nationalisms along the Mediterranean's shores, it was precisely the cultural development of decolonizing states – of how to develop new regional identities that challenged old colonial and new Cold War decrees – that was a primary concern.¹⁰ And it was the medium of the large-scale, international biennial that was considered one of the best ways to manifest that regional amicability and transcultural potential.

This might be one starting point for rethinking the histories of biennials. Another might emerge if we venture to the other side of the globe, to the Indonesian city of Bandung, which – again, auspiciously, in April 1955 – held the conference at which Asian and African countries that were not explicitly aligned with either the US-led capitalist First World or the Soviet-backed communist Second World sought an alternative, transversal community of so-called “non-aligned” nations. This was the birth of the Third World not as a racialized category of poverty or under-development, as it would become in the First World's hierarchical imagination, but as a critical geopolitical entity, one based less on explicit ties of solidarity than on shared experiences of decolonization and an insistence on independence from the Russian–American binary of the Cold War.¹¹ The following year, at a 1956 UNESCO conference in New Delhi, the Bandung accords took root in international cultural relations as well, for it was during this conference that the newly described Third World dedicated itself to promoting alternative routes of cultural as well as commercial exchange from those focused on the First and Second Worlds.¹² By 1961, these routes would be formalized in Yugoslavia in two significant ways: in the official creation of the movement of Non-Aligned Countries in the 1961 conference in Belgrade; and in the new waves of biennials in the country's west that gathered works by artists from across the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and in spite of ideological difference. This occurred in music, with the first Muzički Biennale Zagreb (or Zagreb Music Biennial, subtitled an “international festival of contemporary music”) taking place for a week in May 1961. During the first editions of the Muzički Biennale, Zagreb hosted Igor Stravinsky, John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, and other significant composers and musicians from across Europe and North America, many performing with the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra as well as with students in the Workers' University in the city center. But it is the visual arts we want to focus on here, given the significance by the early 1960s of Ljubljana's Mednarodni Grafični Bienale (or International Graphics Biennial). It was an exhibition that, to a surprising extent, anticipated calls for an alignment of non-aligned cultures, for the 1961 Grafični Bienale was already the fourth edition in its history.

As with the Biennale de la Méditerranée, the first Grafični Bienale was also staged in 1955, with artists from both sides of the Iron Curtain receiving the exhibition's highest awards. Armin Landeck from the United States was the winner of the grand prize, the Prize of the Executive Council of the National Assembly of the People's Republic of Slovenia. Other awards were given to artists from Yugoslavia, Great Britain, Poland, and, in a curious deviation from nation-based assignations, to sculptor Germaine Richier who was listed as coming not from France but from the École de Paris. Subsequent editions of the Grafični Bienale through the 1960s would extend the embrace further, including artists from Asia (Japan, China, Thailand, Malaysia), South America (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay), Africa (Sudan, South Africa), as well as Australasia, Eastern and Western Europe, and the United Arab Republic, Nasser's short-lived dream-state of Arab unity between Egypt and Syria. The purpose of the Grafični Bienale, as its officials would later recount, hinged directly on contemporary political developments. Its mélange of artists and cultural affiliations had as its primary task the “linking of east and west by the bridge of art,” such that it would “underline the same active non-engagement that coincides entirely with our conception of international relations.”¹³ This, in turn, would empower cultural engagements “without violence … and which give hope for the future.”¹⁴ These were horizontal rather than vertical connections, the ambitions of which were (according to Zoran Kržišnik, the Bienale's founder and long-term director of Ljubljana's Moderna Galerija) the “democratization and dynamization” of cultural and exhibition practices.¹⁵

There were obvious complications with these arguments. On the one hand, prizes were retained at the Grafični Bienale; their persistence meant that supposedly “objective” assertions of quality remained, contradicting the egalitarianism and transversality underpinning the biennial's politics of democratization and its “active non-engagement” in geopolitical partitions.¹⁶ Moreover, by replicating the political agenda and discourse of the Non-Aligned Movement, the Grafični Bienale risked being little more than promotional fodder for Tito's ambitions to become the movement's leader, or secretary general (a position he would indeed hold between 1961 and 1964).¹⁷ This was an ambition also harbored by Egyptian President Nasser – who in turn succeeded Tito as secretary general – such that the Grafični Bienale and the Biennale de la Méditerranée stood as markers in the respective leaders' struggle for hegemony among non-aligned nations. Nonetheless, and as was also the case with the Alexandrian biennial, the Grafični Bienale's history reveals how these exhibitions offered a significant way “to pursue politics by other means,” as Caroline Jones has observed of biennials at their best.¹⁸ What they could create was an arena for experimenting with alternative modes of cultural exchange than those demanded by more dominant models of international relations.

It would not be overstating things to suggest that what these biennials of the non-aligned, of the Third World, of the South, were trying to do was to give form to cultural independence in the aftermath of national independence – or, to be more precise, in that tumultuous time between decolonization and absorption back into the tectonic undertow of North Atlantic modernity and the Cold War. What new modes of connection could emerge from the interstice between national independence and Cold War diktats? The answer, for the most part, was neither neo-nationalist retreat nor hubristic drives towards globalization but an insistence on reimagining the regional. In Latin and South America from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, for instance, a spate of biennials opened. In large part, these biennials sought to redirect the axis of cultural and economic influence away from the North (whether that be the United States or Iberia) so as to concentrate on exchange with neighbors in the Caribbean and other parts of South and Central America. In 1968, the Colombian city of Medellín held the first Bienal de Arte Coltejer (its first, full title was actually the Bienal Iberoamerica de Pintura Coltejer, before it branched out to include other media). Named after the city's textile business, the largest at the time in South America, and organized by local dentist and artist Leonel Estrada, the Bienal consisted of hundreds of works shown by artists from across the Americas and the Caribbean, as well as some from Canada, the United States, and Spain. Masks from Haiti, kinetic art from Venezuela and Argentina, mail art from Peru, paintings, engravings, and installations intermingled to emphasize the diversity of Ibero-American practices, all the while dispensing with the separation of art works according to their makers' nationality. A similarly regional focus also developed in the first Bienal del Grabado Latinoamericano in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1970 (albeit with a strict focus on graphic arts rather than the expansive range of practices shown in Medellín), as well as the Bienal Americana de Artes Gráficas in Cali, Colombia, in 1971, and the Bienal Internacional de Arte in Valparaíso, Chile, in 1973.

At the same time, biennials across Asia and in Australia were also seeking to integrate the local within the regional. Again, these exhibitions sought viable modes of internationalism that departed from the Cold War binary. The Triennale-India from the late 1960s sought to develop ties between “non-aligned” cultures through its inclusive surveys of “contemporary world art.” The inaugural Triennale-India at the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi in 1968 was presciently advertised as the “first triennale of contemporary world art,” promoting an alignment of cultures outside the binary axis of Cold War politics even though artists were still selected by nations, along the Venice model. Large First World nations such as the United States participated with substantial contingents of surprisingly progressive artists. At that triennial, Georgia O'Keefe, Stuart Davis, Joseph Cornell, Jackson Pollock, Claes Oldenberg, Robert Morris, and Donald Judd had represented the United States. At the 1971 Triennale-India, Waldo Rasmussen, Executive Director of Circulating Exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, selected works by Carl Andre, Sam Gilliam, Eva Hesse, Robert Rohm, Robert Ryman, Alan Saret, Richard Serra, and Keith Sonnier. Rasmussen had long been instrumental in sending mega-exhibitions of American art to far-flung global destinations. In 1966, he had organized an enormous exhibition of postwar New York School painting, Two Decades of American Painting, for the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. It toured to Tokyo and Kyoto, in Japan, then to New Delhi, before finishing in 1967 at Melbourne and Sydney, Australia.¹⁹

Another of these regional biennials, the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka, Bangladesh, concentrated primarily but not exclusively on painting, sculpture, and works on paper from across the breadth of Asia (but especially post-independence South Asia) for its first installment in 1981. And as we have already seen, after its launch to commemorate the opening of the Sydney Opera House in Australia in 1973, the Biennale of Sydney's second edition, in 1976, gathered together sculpture and performance from the Pacific Rim, bringing Australian land art and modernist sculpture into dialogue with similar works by Japanese and Korean artists, as well as with installations from the San Francisco Bay Area (most notably a “Mother's Day” time capsule and three-channel video installation by the Ant Farm collective). The goal, according to director Tom McCullough, was to encourage “a ‘Pacific Triangle’ of exchange and mutual influence, with Australia and New Zealand forming a third angle” in conjunction with Asia and the American West Coast.²⁰ In 1974, meanwhile, the Baghdad-based Union of Arab Artists established the Arab Art Biennale, an exhibition designed to unite and showcase “all the plastic arts in a contemporary approach, inspired by Arab heritage and world cultural developments for the purpose of formulating, through interaction of Arab art … a convenient atmosphere for the strengthening of artistic and social ties among the Arab artists, and the creation of distinct Arab art.”²¹ Moreover, while the first edition of the Arab Art Biennale would be held in the Union's home-city of Baghdad, it was also intended to migrate to “every other Arab capital” as the first of the world's itinerant biennials. The feat was only achieved once, with the Arab Art Biennale concluding in Rabat, Morocco, in 1976; it nonetheless pre-empted by nearly twenty years the similarly roving Manifesta (the subject of chapter 5) and the intended mobility of Robert Filliou and René Block's Art of Peace Biennale by more than a decade.²²

As the catalogues for these biennials make clear, the selections hinged on an artistic conservatism, at least during the exhibitions' tentative early years. With the possible exception of the Bienal de Arte Coltejer and, to an extent, the second Biennale of Sydney, these biennials of the South turned to traditional mediums of painting, paper, and sculpture as the support for new modes of contemporary practice. Disparate artists were frequently linked by the unifying patina of modernist mannerism and its attendant sentimentalities. Even when emphasizing a specific cultural heritage – as with the Arab Art Biennale – much of the work shown was comfortably figurative, often made by artists trained in Western Europe's art schools or, at their most radical, attempting to link École de Paris abstraction to “Islamic civilization,” as Hussein Sobhi from the Alexandria biennial argued, “in which abstract, geometric and stripped-back art comes close to pure poetry.”²³ This does not mean, of course, that we should seek to recognize or predicate a “belatedness” to these selections or displays. We have to beware of perceiving each aesthetic judgment through North Atlantic vanguard blinkers. Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi, who exhibited at the first Triennale-India of “World Art” in 1968 and the fourth and fifth editions of the Grafični Bienale, might until the twenty-first century have been categorized as a mere adapter of Picasso, like hundreds of now-forgotten artists across the world; with the wisdom of distance from New York hegemony, however, the eclecticism of al-Azzawi's great paintings of contemporary history, such as Sabra and Shatila Massacre (1982–1983), as well as his earlier works of the 1950s and 1960s, looks as deliberate, abrasive, and edgy as many renowned paintings of the same decades, such as Leon Golub's, and not belated at all.

Nonetheless, as students of biennial histories would no doubt assert, and as is often the case with contemporary biennials as well, the strengths and weaknesses of specific art works are sometimes secondary to the significance of the exhibition as a whole, or at least to those aspects of an exhibition that are supplementary to the art works presented. This was certainly the case with these Southern biennials, the importance of which often lay less in the assemblage of art works than in the gatherings of artists, commissioners, writers, and publics from within and outside a given region. In some instances – and this was especially true with Ljubljana, which became a vital meeting-point for artists, curators, and diplomats from the United States, Britain, Romania, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere – biennials allowed people to acquire visas and cross frontiers that would have been extremely difficult, if not necessarily impossible, to cross without the justification of attending the exhibition.²⁴ Whether other, durable opportunities eventuated from such meetings is open to speculation, yet it is precisely this drive for both formal and informal models of regional and transcultural dialogue, and the frequency with which those meetings were documented, that sets the biennials of the South apart from their earlier, more celebrated counterparts.

Other biennials similarly complemented the display of art works with an emphasis on commentary, analysis, and informal reflection about the exhibitions as they took place, transforming the model of exhibition display into an expanded field of discourse. The emphasis on discussion and the biennial as a discursive site presages Documenta11 (2002), which we will describe later in this book, but we should emphasize that this so-called “discursive turn” is not a recent phenomenon. At the Arab Art Biennale, for instance, critic Keith Albarn particularly noted the activities staged “at the end of each day when all men [presumably the artists] became poets, philosophers and musicians, sitting in large circles entertaining each other through to the early hours of the morning.”²⁵ This was clearly not a closed-off activity – the presence of a white Anglo reviewer showed that, at least in relation to race, it was neither exclusive nor exclusionary – but instead an open means for asserting what Albarn called “a common ethos” among the male participants, one that could subtend and extend the Baghdad biennial's pursuit of pan-Arab commonality through the art works themselves.²⁶ In Medellín, the second Bienal de Arte Coltejer became a venue in which participating artists and audiences could discuss and sign petitions against the alleged political fraud and potential coup that struck the Colombian presidential elections just before the Bienal's launch in 1970. These open acts of critique and defiance subsequently spread to other subjects, including the rise of dictatorship and torture in other parts of South America as well as US influence and imperialism in the region. In the process, the Bienal de Arte Coltejer emerged as a rare platform for the dissemination of knowledge about fraudulent politics in the region, for debate among participants, and ultimately for protest against the new impositions of power in South America.²⁷ The discursive format of the biennial would culminate in Havana where, as has become well-known, small makeshift bars were established alongside the exhibition venues that dotted the city during the Bienal's second and third editions, a strategy designed to bring residents and visitors together during the course of the Bienal's existence. In this way, informal debate – or what co-curator Gerardo Mosquera tellingly described as “a ‘horizontal’ South–South platform very much based on personal contact between people from different art worlds” – would complement the Bienal's more formal symposium and its analyses among artists and scholars about the Bienal's themes.²⁸ (In 1989, this was “tradition and contemporaneity,” and the symposium line-up included Geeta Kapur, Charles Merewether, and other critics from across the belt of non-aligned nations and the region of the South more broadly.)

This is only a glimpse at the history of the biennials of the South during the second wave of biennialization from the 1950s onwards. Nonetheless, that brevity does not prevent us from stressing two particular points. The first is that the insistence on regionalism found contemporaneously in many different parts of the world was both a critical and a reconstructive project: critical in the sense that it sought to complicate, and in some instances repudiate, the Cold War binaries of East and West, capitalism and communism, and the trepidations and antagonisms associated with them both; and reconstructive in that what this signaled was a shift from vertical axes of influence from one (economically developed) region to another (less developed), towards more horizontal axes of dialogue and engagement across a region. In this way, the internationalism of the regional could be promoted as transcultural, even egalitarian, and driven by attempts at commonality rather than a will to geopolitical authority and its attendant hierarchies of power. This leads to a second point: it was through informal modes of discourse and discussion that such commonality was emphasized, as much as (or even more than) through the formal presentation and official structures of the relevant biennials. The horizontality of localized exchange – by which we mean the face-to-face discussions, informal philosophizing, song, and so forth – was thus inseparable from the horizontality of regional exchange, the one pivotal to the possibility of the other.

That the biennial should be the medium of choice for this informal, critical regionalism may strike us as odd today, given the current ubiquity (and, on occasion, uncanny similarity) of these mega-exhibitions worldwide. Yet biennials also opened up opportunities for the South that were arguably not afforded by other cultural forms. Their recurrent timing could allow a steady and relatively stable base from which to generate new cultural ties – or what the Union of Arab Artists, for one, called a chance for “getting Arab artists to know each other through regular and periodical gatherings” – during a period notable for profound instabilities and threats of hostility and war.²⁹ That recurrence might also catalyze new cultural infrastructure within each biennial's host city: infrastructure that was both conceptual (through access to and the generation of new theories, practices, and politics of art) and material (through new exhibition venues, audiences, and sponsors), and which could stimulate new manifestations of “locality” during the struggles for decolonization throughout many of these regions of the South.

This produced a paradox, however, for the format of the biennial had a significant colonial heritage, as we noted earlier, one that could potentially hinder or undermine such attempts to use biennials as a way to give form to cultural independence. What the wide-ranging turn to biennials from the 1950s on suggests, though, is that the South's attempts at regionalism were not a radical withdrawal from all forms or histories of colonialism; this was not a struggle for absolute autonomy from either the recent past or other regions and cultures (or what Walter Mignolo, among others, has championed as a process of radical “delinking” from coloniality).³⁰ Nor did biennials highlight a willingness to replicate or be easily assimilated within the cultural forms and debates of the “center” (especially given the insistence on pan-Arab or Ibero-American identity politics, and the frequent exclusion of artists from the United States or Spain). The reality was more complex than either of these two positions. What these exhibitions suggested instead was that the colonial-era format of the biennial could be transformed from within, redirected so as to regenerate local cultural infrastructure, and used as a platform for debating the existing state of “center–periphery” exchange and developing new practices of international relations in their place. These biennials thus epitomized how the deep histories of colonialism could not be disavowed in the South's new spirit of regionalism; rather, they were central to connecting the cultures of the South through “the link of our tragedies,” to borrow Beatriz Bustos Oyanedel's resonant phrase, and more importantly to finding ways to overcome them.³¹

The Second Bienal de La Habana

The argument is often made that the Bienal de La Habana is the first properly global art biennial, importantly inaugurated before the post-1990, post-Cold War proliferation of new biennials worldwide (and thus potentially separable from art's neoliberal globalization). The early editions of the Bienal certainly set a significant foundation for that scholarly ambition, but they were neither the first nor an isolated example of such new ways of thinking international and global cultural exchange by the end of the Cold War. As we have suggested so far, the Bienal appeared late in the second wave of biennials, but its impressively tenacious durability has retrospectively endowed it with the aura of the progenitor. In an important article about the 1989 Bienal de La Habana, Rachel Weiss sensibly asks the following questions, which would equally be faced by the curators of the Asian biennials that we will examine in the next chapter.³² She wondered if the Bienal could outline a Third World theme, without falling into the trap of a single, flattened conception of its subject? What might be the relative uses of the summoning of similarities, or of the elaboration of differences? How could the Bienal formulate a Third Worldist cultural proposition not based in fictions of solidarity? And, she wondered, how could it, following the protagonist role that it envisioned for itself, create a space that was more than just a counterproposal that reproduced the logic and form of the original in reverse?

We know that the curators of all these exhibitions were aware of these questions with greater or lesser clarity, but we might suggest that they were not adequately answered in exhibition form until Documenta11. In returning to the Bienals de La Habana, about which much has been written, we instead stress the need to reconceive the prior histories, predicaments, and potentialities of biennialization, especially given its (and the Cuban state's) claims to struggle against the reduction of the world to two political ideologies.³³ The aim of the Bienal was to create artistic exchanges that were not aligned to either, but this was of course a contradiction.³⁴ Cuba's status as a non-aligned nation blurred quickly into its anti-First World position, for Cuba was a communist state that had relatively recently experienced a revolution and was the client of the Soviet Union. The overthrow of corrupt, pro-US dictatorships and the entrenchment of rapidly institutionalized revolutionary ideals had also resulted in considerable cultural repression during the notorious quinquenio gris (Five Grey Years) of 1971–1976. The Bienal's very important co-curator, Geraldo Mosquera, located the Bienal within Cuba's support during the 1980s for revolutionary movements and leftist insurrections around the world, reminding us that:

The Cuban Revolution has always had an expansionist agenda and has been involved in revolutionary warfare and subversion throughout the world. Apart from some obvious differences, Cuba's approach to the arts has been similarly aggressive.³⁵

In the early 1960s, Cuba was fighting in Algeria on the side of the National Liberation Front and assisting the Simba Rebellion in the Congo. From the early 1970s, Cuban troops and advisers were fighting or actively contributing training and supplies in Nicaragua, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, and Angola, only withdrawing from the latter in 1991.³⁶ Such adventurism in support of its ally, the Soviet Union, masked Cuba's own fragile economy, its financial dependence on its benefactor, and its increasingly straitened circumstances from the mid-1980s on. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the Cuban state's impoverishment, future editions of the impecunious Bienal were to struggle and eventually retreat from South–South purity, just as certain Cuban artists in later Bienals braved the Party's disapproval to express their disenchantment with the régime. The most famous example of the latter was performance artist Tania Bruguera's Tatlin's Whisper #6 (Havana Version) (2009), staged for the Bienal at the Wifredo Lam Center, in which audience members were invited to stand on a dais before a microphone and exercise freedom of expression by publicly declaring support or dissent towards the regime of President Fidel Castro. Two people in military dress regulated the space and placed a dove on the speaker's shoulder, in what Bruguera called “an allusion to the emblematic image of Fidel Castro when delivering his first speech on January 8th [1959] in Havana after the Triumph of the Revolution.”³⁷ However, as Weiss and others point out, despite the harsh political and economic climate, the 1980s was also a period of intense cultural activity, especially amongst Cuban painters.³⁸ In the period after veteran politician and minister of education Armando Hart Dávalos's appointment as minister for the arts in 1976 (his tenure in this job lasted until 1997), the cultural repression of the so-called Grey Years eased,³⁹ and by the mid-1980s a new generation of Cuban artists was emerging who made performances, installations, and who covered walls with graffiti. Their art, contrary to the rhetoric of the Bienal, showed a professionalization within these newer genres that was little different to (and, we must insist, no less sophisticated than) art in the same genres that was at this time emerging from new public art funds in the North, such as Public Art Fund and Creative Time.

The Cuban Communist Party leadership had seen it as natural that Havana would be a prominent Third World cultural identity and a hub for other decolonizing nations. It was not surprising, therefore, that Castro would decree, during one of his famous, inspirational interventions, that a survey of the art of the non-aligned, along with cinema, jazz, and other festivals that still prosper today, be created. Nor was such an idea at all unprecedented amongst Third World revolutionary leaders, as we have also seen. It was a short step from celebrating a great Cuban artist – internationally celebrated surrealist painter Wifredo Lam – to creating the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam and entrusting it with the organization of such a biennial in Havana.⁴⁰ The Cubans were well aware of Medellín's Bienal de Arte Coltejer, the Bienal Americana de Artes Gráficas in Cali, and other biennials held in Latin America during the preceding decade. The emergent Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, located in Old Havana near the Plaza de la Catedral and opposite the cathedral itself, now had to quickly negotiate the gap between the Communist Party leadership's expectation of revolutionary ardor, which had rapidly solidified into doctrinaire control over culture during the Grey Years, and the genuine but unpredictable idealism of artists from around the world who were almost naturally and enthusiastically anti-American and were drawn to Cuba by the romantic aura created by solidarity with revolutionary freedom.

The second Bienal, in 1986, was an event of prodigious scale. It was curated by a team chaired by the long-term director of the Centro Wifredo Lam, Llillian Llanes Godoy. The team included Nelson Herrera Ysla, Ibis Hernández, and Gerardo Mosquera. The exhibition catalogue and contemporary reviews record that the Bienal featured an astonishing 2451 art works by 690 artists from fifty-eight countries across scores of exhibitions, the largest at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, where many works by the invited African artists were installed.⁴¹ There was a special exhibition of more than 200 works by senior Latin American artists, Latin American Masters. It included works by Luis Camnitzer, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Fernell Franco, Antonio Frasconi, Julio Girona, Pedro Meyer, Alejandro Otero, and Antonio Segui, among others. Scores of other, smaller exhibitions were dotted across the city. At the Casa de Africa, there was a partial retrospective of the famous Mozambican painter and poet Malangatana Ngwenya, who had long been associated with the revolutionary FRELIMO movement. The Bienal featured Brazilian modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer with a large retrospective across both the Castillo de La Fuerza and the Museo de Armas. At the Casa de las Américas was the Haitian painter Hervé Télémaque, whose work was identified not only with Parisian surrealism, but also with the Black Pride and Négritude movements. The only country seemingly excluded from the Bienal's embrace of art's global margins was the People's Republic of China; as Cuba was not on friendly terms with Russia's communist competitor, no Chinese artists exhibited at the second Bienal.

Despite this pointed exclusion, the Bienal was notable as both a huge, carnivalesque exhibition but also a meeting point for artists, curators, critics, and scholars from across the South. Organizers and audiences alike felt that these artists would share strong values that were different to the art markets, curators, art museums, and biennials of the North.⁴² The Bienal's organizers wrote that “The Wifredo Lam Center convened the Second Bienal de La Habana, with the purpose of encouraging the development of visual arts in the countries of the Third World in the defense of and search for their most authentic methods of expression.”⁴³ By 1989, as Llilian Llanes Godoy wrote that year, the Bienal “already stands as the most important international event for artists from Asia, Africa and Latin America … where they can show the development of their artistic expression, and set up relationships that will foster the understanding and the importance of its true values,” for as much as possible, artists were invited to install their works themselves.⁴⁴ Gerardo Mosquera even went so far as to say – albeit not completely accurately, given the existence of “horizontal” biennials as far back as 1955 – that,

Never before had artists, curators, critics, and scholars from Buenos Aires to Kingston, and from Brazzaville to Beirut and Jakarta, met “horizontally.” What made this biennial historic was not its curating but its curatorial perspective.⁴⁵

This perspective was more than geographic. It included a density of public programs, lectures, and school events that were later to become standard. A conference on Caribbean art presaged the dilemmas, contradictions, and hard choices that biennial curators and observers across Asia were also to grapple with over successive decades.⁴⁶ Admission to the many public and school events, as well as to the exhibition, was free, courtesy of the Cuban state during the quickly closing window of economic viability. Mosquera described early editions of the Bienal as a pachanga, a true urban festival that stopped the whole city, referring to evening fashion shows outdoors, to Argentinian Kinetic artist Julio Le Parc's workshop with young artists at a park in the El Vedado neighborhood, and to Marta Palau's workshop with young artists that transformed the Museum of Decorative Arts.⁴⁷ There were open-air concerts featuring charismatic singers such as Mercedes Sosa, Chico Buarque, and Pablo Milanés, while artists painted an impromptu multi-part mural as the musicians performed.⁴⁸ Havana was thus clearly distinct from the elite and market festivals that characterized many other biennials by the 1980s, such as Venice and São Paulo; it instead was deliberately aligned with the education and community programs and the grassroots rhetoric that were the hallmarks of other Southern biennials (from the children's education workshops at Coltejer, to the songs and discussions in Baghdad, and the communitarian “town hall” meetings in Sydney, all of which took shape in the 1970s).

The 1986 Bienal de La Habana was just able to afford a now-familiar model of collective curatorial investigation and frugal country-by-country consultation with peer curators and critics. This was often carried out by mail (of course, today, research carried out by snail mail is so much diminished as to be almost nonexistent). Although now common practice, the elaborate process of study, even though carried out in an almost chaotic rush with few resources, biased the Bienal towards a self-consciousness that would only increase at the next edition in 1989. Artist and writer Luis Camnitzer reported that the Bienal invited five Argentinean art critics to each prepare a list of potential artists; the Bienal then selected those artists who appeared on everyone's list. In Uruguay, an art museum director made the selections for the Bienal; his choices were later added to by a Montevideo artist union and by a printmakers' club.⁴⁹ We will see these complicated consultative networks – so far from most contemporary biennials' dependence on the curators' own extensive networks and research – surface once again, belatedly, at the Fukuoka Asian Art Show in 1989 and the Asia-Pacific Triennial in 1993. The emphasis on research dovetailed with the emphasis on education and on public events, presaging the idea of an expanded role for curatorship into curating discourse as well as art. As Weiss notes, Llanes even used the word “researcher” to refer to her team.⁵⁰

The Bienal de La Habana acquired cultural capital precisely because of its indifference to market logic, which was linked to such processes but which also, of course, reflected the socialist Cuban bureaucracy, with its predilection for pseudo-scientific, quasi-military rhetoric. The Centro was embedded within this egalitarian discourse, but Llanes also hinted at her view that the role of curators was administrative rather than authorial, that there should be no Cuban Harald Szeemann (and no imported, external curator on the team). The charismatic Mosquera, who was intimately involved in the first three Bienals but who resigned in the aftermath of the 1989 edition, recognized in retrospect that the Bienal's intensely bureaucratic organization persisted even as it was drawn more into the embrace of the global art-world.⁵¹ While that recuperation has largely but not completely taken place, its early editions insisted on focusing on new works by predominantly younger artists (by regulation, only art created during the preceding five years would be displayed), and it is this insistence on supporting emerging artists and nascent cultural exchange for which the early Bienals were to be remembered. Yet at the time, as Camnitzer shrewdly observed, the novelty, along with what we have come to term the problematic, of the “peripheral,” within which we would now include the supposed exoticism of syncretic, multicultural minglings of tradition in the much-noted performances by Cuban artist Manuel Mendive, were less the moral to be drawn than the long-evident embedding of traditional indigenous representations and crafts within contemporary art forms.⁵² Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee's Pari (1986), for instance, was a figure made from knitted hemp fiber, made using traditional weaving practices, while the symbols and characters that Mendive painted on the bodies of his performers incorporated Santeria ritual, Catholic iconography, and the artist's own invented script. The moral, according to Camnitzer, was that Mendive's performance set up different classifications of the exotic and the peripheral than if the work had been staged in Paris (and, three years later, similar works were, at Magiciens de la terre).

Conclusion: The Stakes of Southern Histories

The legacies of these biennials are definitely precarious. It can be tempting to seek solace or inspiration in historical exhibitions so as to reformat and recontextualize contemporary biennials whose ubiquity threatens to topple over into homogeneity. Yet, just as the return to a supposedly better past risks fetishizing the obsolete, it may also valorize exhibition models that have stagnated since the period of Southern regionalism. As critic and curator Bassam El Baroni astutely points out, this has been the fate of the Alexandria Biennale, which continues to promote the same agenda of Mediterraneanism through the lens of Egyptian nationalism as it did in the 1950s. For Baroni, not only has this become “an ailing ideology with little effect on regional or international politics” but it has doomed the Biennale de la Méditerranée to one solitary, enervated theme throughout its fifty-plus years.⁵³ Other second-wave biennials have either changed focus entirely – as we saw in an earlier chapter, the Biennale of Sydney quickly shed its interest in the Pacific Rim after 1976 – or become defunct through lack of interest, stability, or funding. Other biennials insisted on preserving their exclusively African or Asian – which is to say their continental – identities.

There are, nonetheless, clear stakes in taking a Southern perspective of biennials, not least because of their art historical significance. One of the frustrations with the development of curatorial and exhibition histories in recent years, even at their best, has been their tendency towards inaccuracy and lacunae informed by a Northern bias. Recent claims by Charles Esche and Rachel Weiss, for instance, that the Bienal de La Habana was “only the fourth international two-yearly contemporary art event on the planet” when it opened in 1984, or that its 1989 edition was the first to conceive of biennials as discursive platforms as well as formal exhibitions, are not quite correct, as a broader understanding of Southern biennials reveals.⁵⁴ If anything, the Bienal de La Habana's importance lies not in its status as beginning, but in many ways as culminating, nearly three decades of steady transformations in exhibition making. Biennials did not reject organization by nationality only in the early 1990s, as biennialization began to enter its third wave. Biennials of the South had done so well before, defining themselves, as Esche wrote, “in terms of the political and social mix of the cities that host them.”⁵⁵ These phenomena were already present and highly valued by locals in Sydney, in Medellín, and in other so-called but often intensely cosmopolitan “peripheral” cities seeking to transform the international scope of biennials in the 1960s and 1970s.

What is perhaps most stark about these “peripheral” exhibitions, though, is that they do not sit comfortably within the stereotype of biennials as neoliberal symptom with which this chapter started. While they were certainly internationalist in ambition, it was often a socialist, or at least socialist-inspired, internationalism that subtended their rhetoric and objects. This was as true for the itinerant Arab Art Biennale, created by the Union of Arab Artists to redistribute attention, funds, and education towards and throughout the Arab world, as it was for those biennials promoting the socialist agenda of Tito's presidency in Yugoslavia and Nasser's in Egypt, or even the grounding of many second-wave biennials in the ideologies of socialist solidarity among non-aligned nations. These socialist-inspired internationalisms, and not the radial trajectory of North Atlantic capitalism, must be the primary reference points for revisiting the biennials of the South. That lesson is made especially clear by remembering the protests in Medellín against right-wing dictatorships and American neocolonialism in South America at the start of the 1970s. Whether these biennials could be successful in their endeavors or were simply pawns in the ideological battles of the Cold War – or, in the case of Alexandria, even risked championing the deeply problematic politics and persecution of intellectual and cultural figures by Nasser – is, however, a question that remains very much open.

Regardless of the answer, we need the perspectives of the South to complement – and even more, to challenge – those of the North, and to staunch the relegation of these major exhibitions and cultural histories to the outer edges of supposedly “global” art histories. Given the renewed urgency of reimagining the “global,” it is no surprise that critical notions of regionalism, and of cultural and other connections between regions, have once again become a core sociocultural concern in North Africa and West Asia, across Central and South America, and throughout the South more generally. Indeed, with the legacy of Southern biennials uncovered, the durable vitality of what theorists Ranjit Hoskote and Nancy Adajania term “critical transregionality” becomes clear.⁵⁶ It is a world picture that the biennials of the South present as double-sided. They had grasped their place in the postwar arc of neocolonial globalism. But, even more importantly, they then converted that place into the resistant image of cultural, art-historical, and international reconstruction. That ongoing work is one in which the biennials of the South still have a significant and creative role to play.