Paloma Checa-Gismero’s Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024) focuses on the the development and implementation of three art biennials straddling the end of the Cold War: the Bienal de la Habana from 1984–91, INSITE at the San Diego/Tijuana border from 1994–97, and Manifesta 1 in Rotterdam in 1996. Since their beginnings in the late 19th Century and until the 1980s, only a total of five art biennials happened regularly throughout the world: the Venice Biennale (1894), the Carnegie International (1895), the Sao Paulo Biennial (1951), documenta (1955), and the Sydney Biennial (1973). Then, the later 20th century saw what Checa-Gismero calls the “boom.” In a world opened up by globalization, these biennials promised to model new forms of transnational exchange. At their best, they helped create new art historical categories: “Third World avant-garde,” “Border art,” and “new European art.” At the same time, putting “hegemonic and subaltern repertoires” in dialectical relation (8) often facilitated what we might call the primitive accumulation of local traditions: “By thematizing aspects of everyday life and featuring them as forms and materials in artworks, early-boom biennials aided in the selective bracketing of more and more aspects of regional and sociocultural commons, rendering them legible to a global art audience in formation” (11). The “creative boosterism” of the art biennial also legitimized host cities in a cosmopolitan tourist imagination (134). Through careful archival research and interviews, Checa-Gismero attends not just to the effects of these biennials, however, but to their production: the labor of curating and the sometimes utopian aspirations of curators to collaborate in new collective forms. Her book reorients art historical research not just to the contexts of art reception, but to the creation of those contexts through decisions about funding, selecting, and mounting exhibitions for international audiences.

Checa–Gismero and I met over Zoom on October 30, 2024, to discuss her book and the importance her findings have for our understanding of contemporary art and art worlds. This interview has been slightly condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
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Michael Dango: To introduce us to the broader themes of Biennial Boom, I wonder if you might start by comparing the institution of the biennial with two similar but politically distinct institutions: the institution of the art museum and the institution of the 19th century international exhibition.
Paloma Checa-Gismero: There are striking differences between these three very much related institutions. They’re like cousin institutions. The Art Museum is bound to a collection, and that is a very clear initial difference. It has a longstanding staff: curators, conservators, admin, ideally with long term contracts. It’s bound to projects beyond the sort of one-year, two-year cycle of art biennials. This also means that museums and their workers have durational relationships with local audiences. They get to know who are the local audiences who return to the museum. Ideally, they program for them as much as they program for art tourists.
Often, museums are tied to the Westphalian nation-state model, they help create national identities, local identities, ideas about place and belonging, etc. The Art Museum is thus invested in the production and the preservation of heritage. Not only discursively but also materially. Many museums have restoration departments, and they also have a very sophisticated infrastructure, stronger than art biennials, often tied to national or sub-national budgets.
International Expositions, which predate the art biennial boom by a hundred years at least, are involved in picturing the world. They are world imaging devices that, in their early beginnings, reflected competitions between nations. If we think of the first International Exposition in London, in 1851 and in Paris very soon after, in 1855, they were markers of imperial reach. They showed audiences how far the British and the French empires were going in the middle of the 19th century. And they showed this in many different ways. They showed it by showcasing scientific and technological objects. Raw materials from their colonies. Exotic historical objects and cultural artifacts, including artworks, but not limited to artworks.
The way they showed artworks predates biennials, but problematizes them, too. In London, in the first Crystal Palace Exhibition, we see artworks included throughout the whole exhibition. They chose some very erotic sculptures that helped guide audiences throughout the exhibition. In Paris, since the beginning, we already saw art shown as a separate category, in its own wing, inaugurating a sort of artistic autonomy.
Like the biennial, however, the International Exposition has a non-durational relationship with place. Exhibitions are meant to happen for a season, and their workers are committed to it for a specific amount of time. The art biennial shares the cyclical temporality of the expo. They have a seasonal commitment with their staff. They are invested in the exhibition of art objects and the crafting of narratives about local and regional place. Art biennials, like international expos, are spectacular productions. The work of Caroline Jones very well shows how this spectacularity is crafted in the global art biennial. And so the three institutions share material reliance and local elites in order to exist. None of them would exist were it not for local patrons who decide to chip in money and political resources for them to take place. And they have a very, very tight bond with the cultural tourism industry.
MD: I love how you began and ended that answer with an attention to the staffing of the biennial versus the other forms, because so much of your book is also exploring questions of labor. Your chapters on the Havana Biennial, for instance, situate it in the context of contemporaneous debates about the role of artistic production for socialism. In contrast to Fidel Castro’s preference for the autonomy of curatorial expertise, you note that the approach of the early Bienal planning group “was closer to nonorthodox socialism’s goal of overcoming alienation by enhancing collaborative relations between workers” (54). Could you tell us a bit more about how organizers thought about politics not just in terms of the work exhibited, but in terms of how that work was researched and selected in the first place?
PCM: In the book, I describe a three-pronged approach to this more horizontal working model. On one hand, there’s the research stage where specialists, which is the name that was given to what we might call curators now, trace the extent of Cuba’s diplomatic network, often relying on non-artistic social relations and infrastructures to access the work of artists and other cultural producers in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. An important precedent for this kind of research model, where curators just travel to their region of expertise and spend months and months on site, were the medical and military international solidarity campaigns that had been spearheaded by the Cuban state throughout those regions since the 1960s.
The second stage of this work model was one of joint analysis and deliberation of all the materials brought by specialists back to Havana. These materials were diverse in nature, and very much not like what we might today associate with research materials in contemporary art. In some cases, they brought catalogs and slides, but in many cases these kinds of productions did not exist. Many of these regions had a very different kind of cultural infrastructure to the one that we’re used to today. And so the research materials included books, but also conversations, photos that curators took, brochures that they could gather from here and there, etc.
They discussed everything together and pursued the best way to organize the diverse positions of artists in the exhibition spaces. Not following the formal criteria of artworks necessarily, but instead hoping to highlight the worldviews and perspectives of artists. Hoping to achieve this sort of Bakhtinian poly- or choral consciousness within the exhibition space.
The last stage of this work ethos was the installation proper of the exhibition, where specialist curators often joined the installation crews and took a hands-on approach to translating their visions into the gallery space. So we can think of this as a culture of not only resource sharing among different members of the staff, but also of skills and material sharing. They were assisted often by volunteer workers who were both art students from the National School of Fine Arts, but also had been brought in through the volunteer brigades.
And so this three-tiered approach, together with the durational employment of specialists in the biennial, gave them a very deep knowledge of not only the objects, but also the discursive layers of the exhibition and its potential to embed itself in place. It helped efforts to really connect the exhibition with the city of Havana and its publics.

MD: This relation to place was not the same for other biennials. In your chapters on inSITE, you note that the avowed politics of voicing the borderlands was often at odds with the works selected for exhibition, which “relied on artistic languages developed under interpretive regimes that favor art’s formalism over its practiced engagement with social life” (103). What kinds of work did biennials in the 1990s do to merge distinct artistic genealogies? I am thinking, for instance, of how you position Silvia Gruner’s 111 replicas of the Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl, installed on the border fence for inSITE94, between older and younger generational approaches to site specific art in Mexico.
PCM: This is a complex question. It’s hard to say up to what extent were curators always set up from the get go to merge art genealogies, or if this at times happened as a result of selecting artworks and artists for a whole other set of reasons. For example, as I show in the book, the aspirations to associate themselves with members of the global elite made biennial organizers at the local level interested in forms of art making that they identified as organically closer to that said global elite. But regardless of the reason, the acts of selecting and then juxtaposing in the same space artworks from distinct cultural paradigms were then wrapped up, or I would say narratively justified, by what I call aesthetic conversions. These are operations of both semiotic translation into a shared discursive space, but chiefly also of ontological change for these objects, turning them into the same kind.
For instance, the artwork that you cite, Silvia Gruner’s piece, one of my favorite pieces in the book. It’s a fantastic example of the many thresholds and liminalities that informed and came to be within and around the early boom. Gruner’s installation points to generational renewals, yes, but also to the ontological changes at play in liberalism’s border regimes. The capacity of aesthetic genealogies to existn their own terms after crossing the border. As I discuss in my book, this capacity to be on their own terms after border crossing was denied, at the time, also to humans and their humanity, in anticipation of today’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
MD: Maybe related to this question of artistic convergences is also artistic divergences, or divergences especially in audience. In the months leading up to Manifesta 1, Viktor Misiano, one of its curators, also controversially included Oleg Kulik’s performance of Dog House: Nude as part of Interpol—A Global Network from Stockholm and Moscow. At first, we might be tempted to read Kulik’s naked performance of a dog, which included biting an audience member, as part of the social negativity championed by Claire Bishop in response to Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics.” But you show Misiano was interested in something else, what he called “rituals of initiation into a community of the elect—a mafia”: a compensation for the loss of community and institutions in specifically post-Soviet Moscow (quoted on 214). Could you tell us about other moments when there might seem to be a misfit between the context of production (in this case, Moscow) and the context of reception (in this case, Rotterdam)? Did biennials ever anticipate or indeed encourage these incongruities?
PCM: This type of incongruity was all around in the early biennial boom. Early boom biennial curators were trying to accomplish the pretty difficult task of creating common ground, a common framework—discursive and material, too—for objects that had originated in very, very different spaces. They were trying to merge a wide array of localities into a shared conception of the global. The clear example that I described in the book are the incongruities that emerge around and within inSITE. The reception paradigm for inSITE was set to coincide with forms of producing art that were dominant elsewhere, not to coincide with forms of making art that had been existing in the borderlands for a very long time. They were set to coincide with the gallery-oriented formalism of the North Atlantic avant garde and its aftermaths, an operation that was achieved by importing many artworks and artists from outside of their immediate cultural context into a place that had its own reception tradition and production tradition.
In the case of Havana, these incongruities were also very, very present. Think about curating objects from all over the Non-Aligned bloc into the same space. So difficult. But the efforts to bring up their commonalities and highlight their potential to form a choral consciousness were really large and complex. The curators organized theoretical events, such as conferences and seminars and symposiums, educational workshops, seemingly non-artistic programs, such as dinners, parties, and music shows that helped the many artists and curators from Africa and the Americas, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Asia to forge common ground inside.
The outcome of these encounters was a shared aesthetics of production. It’s not that curators were trying to translate or convert objects from Africa into a way of receiving art and making art, that was, you know, Cuban. Instead, they acknowledged the necessity of creating a new, shared aesthetics of production of the subaltern that highlighted process, agency, and the fabrication of artworks over their passive reception, as it was dominant in the North Atlantic avant garde tradition.
MD: The biennial boom in the 1990s also coincides with the rise of the celebrity freelance curator, whose self-branding—and branding as self—was often at odds with “organizers’ collaborative aspirations” (as you say in the context of Manifesta 1). Is there something about the organization or form of biennials themselves—their structures of funding, for instance—that especially encourages this celebrity branding of curators or requires individuals, rather than collectives, ultimately be in charge?
PCM: In my opinion, global biennials were a byproduct of an ascendant neoliberalism. Many of the professional forms that emerged within biennials spoke and reflected the demands of the changing economic system that had clear supranational aspirations. The figure of the individual freelance curator that already existed before the early biennial boom, but was becoming really visible at the time, satisfied the demands of flexibility, fast-paced change, and rapid innovation of increasingly precarious cultural labor under neoliberalism. Biennial curators worked project by project, often on year-long contracts, all over the world. They had to be able to move and relocate to different locations per contract, and thus experienced the need to brand themselves in an industry that favored competition and one’s capacity to distinguish oneself as professionals from the rest of peers.
If we think about the other curatorial paradigm that is predominant in artistic production, that of the museum curator, then we’re talking about a remnant from a previous stage of capitalism, one that is not supranational, but still bound organically to the borders of the nation state. Also, museum curators work collectively. They work alongside other professionals within the museums. They engage in collective workflows. These flows are very hierarchical, but they’re still collective in a sustained manner through time, yielding not only concrete exhibitions and archives and catalogs, but also, more broadly, institutional and national identity.
MD: Related to the question of the star curator is also the question of corporate sponsorship. For instance, you narrate how Philip Morris contributed a quarter of Manifesta 1’s budget, and, as sole private sponsor, secured special publicity privileges. In your understanding, were curators at any of the biennials you studied ever able to pervert the official goals of patrons, for instance redirecting capitalist funds toward communist futures? Or is this a pretty straightforward and cynical case of artwashing?
PCM: Although I really can’t speak to the personal political commitments of many curators, I’m sure that they did diverge from those of their sponsors very often. But the case of Philip Morris is really one of art washing. It’s well documented that the tobacco manufacturer has been an avid collector of contemporary art since the sixties, and it’s very much art washing.
Aside from that, I see many present biennials where this redirection of capitalist funds towards other ways of organizing life is ongoing and very much taking place. One really good example is the controversial case of documenta 15 in 2020, in the city of Kassel, Germany. Another fascinating case is the Counterpublic Triennial, in the city of St Louis, Missouri. I’m really excited to see how far can this politics of redirection be pushed, and what tactics invisible to funders might be deployed in years to come?

MD: Thank you for also bringing us a bit to the present in thinking about documenta 15. Today, 30 years after the boom of the 1990s, how would you characterize the mood and form of biennials? Do you think cosmopolitan optimism remains the reigning ethos? Do you see any openings for a return to more collaborative models of curation like at the earliest Bienal de la Habana?
PCM: There are so many art biennials today that it’s difficult to make a blanket statement about them as a whole. The industry has become so large that there are some biennials that are no longer interested in this optimism, but have turned to respond to local concerns and regional needs –such as Counterpublic.And then there are other art biennials, perhaps those that arrived much later to the boom, that still behave as if they could really help regional elites access global cosmopolitan spaces or position their cities on the world map. Biennials are still one of the mechanisms by which cities aim to attract global attention. And so are, you know, World Cups and Olympics and film festivals.
But I would say the gains from this strategy are way smaller today than they were in the early boom days. My interest today is mostly with art biennials that have understood that cosmopolitan and global optimism is just not possible, with the ongoing multi-layered catastrophe that threatens life in all of its understandings. Biennials have instead turned to exploring more sustainable relationships with local publics.
I want to think of biennials as infrastructure for the public good, and I believe that there’s so much to gain and to grow from such a disposition. I know there are many curators also interested in seeing their work go in this direction. A really great example of this was the 2020 Berlin Biennale that rapidly turned to work with local publics. As the pandemic started, it turned its attention to helping mitigate some of the social damage, while still maintaining its commitment to showing contemporary art, and also visualizing local histories and strengthening systems of mutual aid on the neighborhood level.
MD: Thank you for those examples, too. That’s really helpful for us to to keep thinking about. I have one last question connecting your book to the present day, this one focused on scholarly method. Just as you say the category of the “Third World avant garde” “challenged the centrality of formalism in the North Atlantic art canon, primarily through its emphasis on audience participation and multisensory engagement beyond the visual” (35), your own book challenges a focus on the form of artworks by calling our attention instead to the processes of curating and exhibiting artworks, entailing a different kind of archival research and exegesis. What kind of art historical work would you like to see in this vein in the future? More broadly, what do you want the discipline to reflect upon and enact after reading your book?
PCM: My attempt with this book was to shed light on the often hidden processes involved in how we, as a society, grant worthiness to some objects over others, and thus classify them as art. And this, of course, extends to humans and ways of living, ways of loving, and ways of caring for each other. I chose the 1990s globalization moment so as to be able to explore this question in a variety of social spaces, and not just one that I’m familiar with. As far as the discipline goes, I would love to see a greater emphasis on the histories of production that are involved in what society distinguishes as art. I don’t really only mean the material fabrication of artworks, which is really important. I’m very interested in seeing the discipline moving into showing us the social relations and the relations of production that are often concealed in moments of artistic distinction. I believe academic art history is very, very well positioned to do so, given its semi-autonomous relationship with the cultural and heritage industries. We do have very easy access to them, but we’re also in some ways still, hopefully for long, autonomous from them. And I’m convinced that such a turn would not only yield more truthful knowledge about art and its role in our societies, but from a very practical standpoint, it would train skilled professionals that are more employable, with the skills to enact positive social change towards shared good life for all.
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