Biennales: An Asian Renarration

LASALLE's MA Asian Art Histories programme is proud to welcome Professor Anthony Gardner for their Annual Lecture.

In Biennials, Triennials, and documenta, Charles Green and Anthony Gardner narrate a history of biennales that span “waves” of the large-scale international exhibitions that have transformed contemporary art making, display and reception. In this lecture, Gardner will complicate that narrative by taking a much closer view of biennales in Asia. What might an account of biennales in Asia look like and how might that focus challenge and transform the kinds of narratives offered by their “three-wave” model? Can it invite a more nuanced account of what biennales can offer its myriad publics so as to enrich the histories of these exhibitions in the world?

Anthony Gardner is Head of the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford, where he teaches Contemporary Art History and Theory and is a Fellow of The Queen’s College. He is an editor of the MIT Press journal ARTMargins, and has published widely. Among his books are Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations (2013), Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (2015) and the anthology Neue Slowenische Kunst: From Kapital to Capital (with Zdenka Badovinac and Eda Čufer), which was a finalist for the 2017 Alfred H Barr Award for best exhibition catalogue worldwide. His latest book, co-authored with Charles Green is Biennials, Triennials and documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art (2016).