Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global

The question this article asks is how exhibition histories of contemporary art shift when seen not from the perpetually insistent demands of the north, but from the viewpoints and aspirations of the South. What might a Southern perspective of biennials look like? These 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 mid-1950s into the 1980s, and which insisted upon a self-conscious, critical regionalism as the means for realigning cultural networks across geopolitical divides. Biennials of the South had grasped their place in the postwar arc of neo-colonial globalism. But, even more importantly, they then converted that place into the resistant image of cultural, art historical and international reconstruction.