What Biennials Reveal About the Art World

0:03A large portion of these shows were with dead artists and now we're finding a complete reversal of that trend back to what we'd seen in 2019 with almost no dead artists will redirection and focus on what's happening now.

0:21I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:32We talk a lot about biennials. Art is, in some ways, a very local, in-person thing, but artists and curators and writers are also part of a global conversation, looking at and thinking about each other across borders. And these big recurring art festivals can serve as an opportunity or a prompt to think about what that bigger conversation is. One of the biggest, the Venice Biennale, is coming up next month. It's centered around a show called In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kuo. My colleague Joe Lawson Tancred recently had an article looking at the artists in that show, comparing where they were from and how old they were to the artists in the last several editions of the Venice Biennale to see how the art conversation was evolving.

1:19Meanwhile, I have just published a big project this week looking at the last four years of art biennials around the world from the big ones in places like Istanbul, Guangzhou, Sao Paulo, Sharjah, and Venice to smaller or more experimental ones. I gathered all the names of artists and found who has shown the most around the world since the 2022 Venice Biennale four years ago. Some of the names that I found are familiar. Some were total surprises to me. So with Venice soon to open, I thought I'd get together with Joe and talk about what we've learned from our different projects about where the global art conversation has been and where it's headed.

1:58Joe, thanks for being here to talk to me about this. Hi, thanks for having me on. So I guess I started to introduce it, but go ahead and talk a little bit about what you did. Yeah, so as you mentioned, Venice is probably the biggest global art event. And we wanted to see for every curator that it's such a big exhibition, they're trying to probably include as much as possible. but inevitably they have to make some choices about regions in the world or types of artists that they're particularly interested in. And so we thought it would be interesting to compare the high-level demographics, so looking at regions, not countries, and looking at decades where artists were born or whether or not they were living or dead, to get a very kind of high-level view of what the focus is for the different curators in the past four years.

2:51We did this last year, and that time it was three years, so we're kind of continuing that data project. And we wanted to see what the trends were, and I think we found quite a lot. Yeah, and I guess we should say that, I mean, part of the reason to do this is because they're kind of received this way, right? They've become to be seen kind of as a referendum on who's in and who's out, so it's always a little dicey counting where people are from, right? But it's worth doing or worth trying to do because it matters to people. It's a broad strokes look. So, I mean, especially with region and geography, it's very hard to definitively categorize artists who will have moved around across continents many times in their lives and might be from somewhere, but may be affiliated with a scene somewhere else.

3:37Yeah, in some ways, it's very funny. All this focus, all our focus on geography and region, which is very important because people have been thinking a lot about which regions didn't get ever shown. But at the same time, these are very cosmopolitan events and often very cosmopolitan artists who are more in one place making work, maybe about where they're from, but also working in two or three different places, making work about that, too. So, yeah, it's all very dicey. But what did you find? Well, I would say the biggest takeaway that was true across looking at age and also geography was we noticed a real change oddly back to 2019.

4:16so the trends that had started to emerge at the first half of this decade don't seem to be carrying on at least from what we saw so you heard in 2022 Cecilia Alemani start to really put the focus on looking at historical women artists who hadn't had their G and that was obviously very timely with what galleries were doing and museums were doing and then in 2024 we had Adriana Pedroza doing a similar exercise but trying to look at who had been overlooked in the global South. And that meant a large proportion of these shows were with dead artists. And now we're finding a complete reversal of that trend back to what we'd seen in 2019 with almost no dead artists, a real redirection and focus on what's happening now.

5:03Well, I guess there are a couple of dead artists. I think this show has Marcel Duchamp in it, right? But yeah, it is striking. A return to pre-pandemic times. What do you make of that? Well, I think the point you made is quite interesting about, yeah, of course, there are a few dead artists in this show. Less than 10%, though, and that was more than 60 % in 2024. So that's about a 50 % difference in presence of dead artists. Huge drop. And where there are some, they tended to have died in the past decade or so. So apart from Duchamp, which is a huge outlier, it's not going way back into history at all.

5:44and of the living artists one thing that we noticed which I think kind of chimes with this focus on the now so 60 percent were born between 1950 and 1980 which roughly correlates with gen x boomer so kind of middle-aged or a bit past middle-aged but that group which you might think kind of that's mid-career established artists would naturally dominate a show like this they accounted for just 25 % of the artists on view in 2024 so less than half the portion and there instead the focus tends to be on either very older artists or sometimes very young artists I think the oldest artist in Pedroza's show two years ago was born in 1923 and the oldest artist in this show was born in 1943, Helen Sabidi.

6:35So that's two years later, a much younger cohort, even if they're not necessarily that young. Looking at that middle group that really make up the bulk of the exhibitors, there's a strong mix of established names that you might expect to see, Nick Cave, Carsten Holler, Alfredo Yarr, and then a large presence of artists who have made that name regionally and are now ready for that big moment that's on the global stage, which I think is sort of probably what the original mission of the main exhibition at the Biennale is, is to give people that moment. Bored strokes, I'd say the data shows we're returning to the original aims of that main exhibition.

7:14Yeah, I mean, it is interesting because there's a lot of emphasis on firsts and Koyokuo was the first African woman curator to do the show. And these last couple shows have been very focused on redressing absences in the historical record. So yeah, it is a striking finding that you have there that seems to show that it's almost a little bit of a reversion to an earlier moment. And I have to say, yeah, looking at Kuo's list, and we'll have to see how it feels when we get there, it feels much more like central to the institutional art world as I know it and kind of observe it, the list of names, even though there's a large number of figures from Africa, a lot of indigenous artists, but they do somehow feel to me like very central, not discoveries in a way, which is kind of what you're talking about.

8:10Either the last one was a little, both a little bit younger and a little bit older, interestingly, like focusing on slightly more outside the central network conversation. In my project, when I look at the artists in this upcoming Venice Biennale list, and yeah, a lot of them are really on trend in terms of they are the absolute top of the top of the circuit of artists who've been appearing in shows for the last four years. They are not discoveries. and I would add something else that I really kind of aligns with 2019 for the data I was looking at is a much more slimmed down size of group show so it feels a lot more focused I think it probably is a change that maybe needed to happen the show in 2024 was described as quite kind of bloated and a bit over ambitious and I think it chimes with this focus on the now what's happening now kind of maybe giving people what they expect a bit more.

9:10But yeah, I would love to hear more about what you found. Were there any surprises? Well, yeah, I mean, and I guess that's a bit of a paradox, isn't it? That's why you do these projects for all the slipperiness and weirdness of counting things, how you count, what counts, all the potential to miss things and get things wrong. It does surface things that I don't see. So yeah, paradox being, I just said a lot of the names are familiar to me from this project that are folks who have shown in lots of shows. However, there are some names that despite having apparently been everywhere, were not in my field of view that emerged to me from this.

9:48So I looked at all these biennials, you know, over 200 shows, 125 different biennials doing different editions. And it's rare that an artist is showing in more than one. And then there are some, very, very few, who are showing in more than 10. And I'll just read you everybody who is in more than 10 because some of them are familiar names to me, some of them aren't. So the busiest artist in this time period is an artist from South Africa named Nolan Oswald Dennis, who's in 14 shows. And that was a name that I did not know. After that is a Canadian artist named Kapwani Kiwanga, who was in 13 shows.

10:33A Palestinian artist named Jamal Amanah, who was in 13 shows. Christian Nayampeta, who was in 11 shows. The duo Basil Abbas and Ruan Abu-Ramey, who's currently in the Whitney Biennial. They are in 11 shows. Lawrence Abu-Hamden, who's in 11 shows. And the Congolese artist, Sami Bologi, who's in 11 shows. So what do you think of those names? Are they new to you or familiar? A few are in Koyo's list, which I think speaks to this sense that we're saying that she's chiming in with the present moment. But I agree with you, maybe not as familiar as you might expect. Nolan Oswald Dennis, maybe it's not surprising they're in this show because they are a South African artist.

11:24I should say they use they, them pronouns. So there's a South African art circuit. I think that's something you really see in this list of top names. If you want to take it as an index of what themes have been important, not just in one place, but all around the world. Because looking at where the geographical distribution of these shows, each of these artists is shown in all corners of the world, that it's a lot of artists from Africa or with African backgrounds doing work about colonialism in Africa. And then Palestinian artists or artists from the Middle East doing a lot of work about the situation of Palestinian people.

12:06Those are the main spine of the biennial geographic interest in as much as it transcends the local geographies where these shows are at. So you can sort of see a global south or a post-colonial circuit of thought that travels around the world. But Nolan Oswald Dennis, not a name I knew, apparently a phenomenally influential artist. and kind of, I think, looking at what they do, maybe a good example of, I would say, the ideal type of a biennial artist in this time period. What they do is research into colonial archives and then discover some bit of research that has an aesthetic energy and does something that looks a little bit like a science project or a poetic commentary on it.

13:04So their most famous work of art, which has traveled widely, is called the Black Liberation Zodiac, which is an ongoing project where it takes the form of these white on black celestial charts that take the map of the heavens and replaces the Greek constellations which are apparently taught around the world, not just in Europe. Actually, it never occurred to me to think about how the stars were taught elsewhere in the world. So kind of an interesting fact and replaces them with new constellations based on the history of black liberation. So that kind of gives a sense of a certain kind of art style that has traveled very widely.

14:03it's interesting how much the findings in terms of geography align i think when we did our data dive we expected to see a lot of african artists represented because an african created that would be her area of speciality but it's interesting that that's obviously chiming with a wider conversation and speaking to the return to 2019 and perhaps this one's a bit more incidental So I would say with the show this year, there's going to be about a 50-50 % between Western and Global South artists, which is a return. Last year, with Pedrosa's focus, a clear majority were Global South with quite a lot of representation from Latin America.

14:48But also Alamani in 2022, that was 75 % focus on the West, pretty Eurocentric. most of that was Europe. But back in 2019, we again saw about a roughly 50-50 split. So it's kind of leveling back to something that we'd seen before. Yeah, yeah. And I'm not exactly sure what to make of that. I mean, to a certain extent, you have to say that there's a degree of just curatorial preference. You know, I think it'll be a good day when we can just look at the biennials sort of for their own merit instead of part of these larger trends and just kind of assume, you know, if some kind of artist isn't in one show, it's not about the general direction of art history.

15:33It's just about curatorial preference. And I'm sure that some of these curators, that's what they say. I think it's worth saying about the North American or European representation that a lot of the artists in my top biennial artists list for this year are European or North American, or at least that's where their passport comes from, but come from minority or immigrant or indigenous backgrounds within those areas. So, for instance, the artist Raquasi Dyson, who is a black American artist and was in nine shows over the course of the last four years, makes enormous black geometric sculptures that actually are sort of unique they have a very specific material and style most of these artists are research-based and honestly it's really frustrating to like have to try and research them because it takes pages and pages where you can really get a picture of what they do visually because it's every one of them says they're a research-based artist who works with issues of history and memory and politics and you just have to hack through a lot before you really get a sense of what that thought manifest as.

16:49It's interesting because in the statement that Koyo Kuo has about this show, she groups Turquoise Dyson with Nolan Oswald Dennis as artists who both explore black space, black consciousness of space. Because even though Dyson's work looks like black abstract sculpture, the geometry of it is all in dialogue with a theory, black compositional thought that Dyson has about of movement by black communities and black populations that kind of informs the geometry. I guess what I'm saying, geographically, I think that although this is returned to North America, it is still part of what I see as kind of the principal conversation people are having, which is about colonialism and the history of minority communities and the relationship between the West and the rest of the world as one of domination.

17:42Yeah, I completely agree. I think especially because unfortunately Koyo isn't here to speak about the show herself and there hasn't really been a clear spokesperson who has emerged it's been kind of interesting to try and use this data to understand a bit about I suppose what she was trying to do or where trends are going but I think it's going to be exciting to see it in real life and have these distinctions kind of to spot those thematic links and probably not spend very much time thinking about where someone was born or where they've lived for the past five years or all those things that obviously have been prevalent in this research.

18:21So that's interesting what you say about the research-led practices. Were there any other trends you spotted? Yeah, for sure. I mean, plants. Plants is a big one. I was noting, reading Kuo's statement, that she speaks of plants. The plantation, the settlement, The ruinous flood, the quarry, the fire, and the profound memory of geology that absorbs their violences. That's a sentence from her curatorial statement where she introduces a bunch of artists, including Nolan Oswald Dennis and Turquoise Dyson. And Joanna Haji Thomas and Khalil Horej, who are in my most shown artists lists. She talks about the Creole garden as being an overarching theme.

19:06And you just see so many artists working with plants. I mean, I would almost say that if you want to be a top artist in 2026, you should study botany or bio art. You are as likely to encounter some kind of living specimen of plants as a painting in a biennial, it seems. And on this list, much more likely. So Kapwani Kawanga is most famous for a work called Flowers for Africa that she took to places, including the Singapore Biennial last year, where she recreates flower arrangements or botanical events from the history of African liberation and then lets them wilt as kind of a statement about the heritage of colonialism.

19:56So that's one manifestation of this kind of energy. Sammy Bologi, Congolese artist. I remember seeing his work at the Berlin Biennial, which is essentially a terrarium filled with Central African plants, which is, again, about the heritage of colonialism. Just an awful lot of work with plants, politically charged plants. Interesting. And then sound art. A lot of the major artists are working with sound, interestingly. Tara Katui, who's an artist I don't know very well, a Lebanese artist who makes environments made of his own musical instruments that people can play, that become sound events. And then an artist I do know, Raven Chacon, who I think is one of the best artists working right now, who's in nine biennials in this last four-year period, and is originally a composer and works in experimental sound and creates sound installations and video installations, particularly about indigenous consciousness, indigenous struggle in the United States, but coming at the question in all kinds of experimental ways.

21:04And I should say there's some kind of connection between the sound and the plants in a way. Like, I think there's a real drive to make these shows feel alive and evolving and living and focus on the living body and humans. Yeah, I read it all as very anti-digital in a certain kind of way, even though I'm sure that these sound artists incorporate digital in various ways. But really to feel like you're part of a live space, an evolving event, seems to me to be a very important mode of thinking right now. I did a list on Artnet News of what we can expect from the pavilions announcing different nations' artists.

21:44And so I feel that anecdotally I've had a bit of an insight into what we might expect there. And I would say certainly a lot of engagement with landscape, plants, ecology, water. So I'm very excited for the Austria Pavilion, which is sort of like a sea world. and obviously Venice water. It's a great place to explore that topic. Yeah, but I would say water was right behind plants in terms of like themes that you see. I mean, Tara Katui, who I mentioned, he has done for, I believe, the Sydney Biennial, an entire project that's about ports, about the sound of ports from around the world. And I think Carolina Caicedo, who's an artist who was in nine biennials, that's her entire project is looking at water systems.

22:31She has a massive project called Be Damned that kind of evolves in different forms and focuses on the history of dams and how they've affected river communities in a colonial sense. So water, a big one. What else do you see emerging in the pavilions, Jo? Well, somewhat related to water and sounds, the Poland Pavilion is going to have a sound installation that's inspired by rail sounds. kind of tunes in with in minor keys and slowing down and modes of communication that you know might be overlooked or threatened there's a kind of myth storytelling I think returning back to traditional modes and craft a lot of emphasis on that which I would also completely agree with you there are interesting things obviously happening with digital art you might think we were seeing a bit more of that this is nations picking something to put forward that they think is going to be eye-catching or interesting and stand out.

23:31I think it's kind of remarkable how little digital experiments are happening and we're seeing these trends. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I feel like this has been going on for a little while, but yeah, storytelling, folklore, and a lot of, I would say, even when there's a kind of technological or futurist impulse. It happens within the realm of sort of storytelling, often kind of post-apocalyptic storytelling, like a return to a sort of simpler way of life or after a catastrophe. Like the video artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, who's like really big in the world and has come up in a bunch of things I've written as someone who's everywhere.

24:19That's a kind of work he is known for is these video storytelling. He has one called The Boat People that's been at a couple of biennials that's about a post-apocalyptic future where people are returning to nature and kind of figuring out the past. Not a super positive view of technology. And then I did note from my list, there are two separate major artists on this list. The duo Khalil Horej and Joanna Hadji Thomas, who are Lebanese filmmakers. They did a work called the Lebanese Rocket Society. It's about looking at the past, at like history in Lebanon of experiment with space travel. It's like a real archival project that they did.

25:02And then the Angolan artist Kilwanji Kiyahenda has a project called Icarus 13, The First Journey to the Sun from 2008. That's kind of an invented history of Angolan space exploration. So it's interesting. There are these emerging themes. And I would say that another big trope is critical fabulation. It's a term from the thinker Cydia Hartman. But this looking at the past and filling in the gaps with fiction, fantasy, storytelling, I would say, it's a very big part of these shows. I should say one more thing. You mentioned in your research the unusual presence of artists' organizations, which I'd say is a trope in recent biennials, the inclusion of collectives and organizations.

25:53But it was something that stood out to you in this list, right? We didn't really categorize it in the data. There's not a person to say where they were born or when or where. Right, right. It stood out to you because it was like a speed bump is what you're saying. Yes. It seems also a bit different from collective. It's so open-ended. It's more like an initiative than even a group of people. I don't know. I'll be interested to see how that's presented because it's some of them I think are like schools or something. So it's not a group with a singular mission from what I've understood. Your mention of them and their presence here, I was reflecting on it in the context of my project in the sense that something that I notice is that a lot of these artists, when you dig into their backstory, have been involved or continue to be involved in some sort of collective process or founders of some sort of organization.

26:50You know, I think Sammy Bologi actually is co-founder of the Lubumbashi Biennial in the Congo, where he's from. And Nolan Oswald Dennis and Tabitha Rizere, who's another one of the big artists in this last period, has been in a ton of biennials for a while. And by the way, has become a farmer, has opened her own agricultural center in French Guiana. So that's the plants and biology again. But she and Nolan Oswald Dennis were in an art collective called NTU, which was about bringing an awareness of African sciences and technologies and has had its own retrospective already. And Christian Nyampeta, who is also up there, is often included or celebrated for something that he founded called the Boda Boda Lounge, which is a trans-African film and video art festival.

27:45So I feel like a lot of these figures are at the center of networks of advocacy, kind of when we talk about the geographies that they're pulling in. It's probably because that form of advocacy or collective work has been really important in the recent past and is maybe a really important part of artistic careers right now. That's super interesting. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about that, but it will be cool if we see more of that in the coming years. so do you think we're going back to 2019 what do you think it means i think we probably learned some good lessons on the way but it's a bit of a missed opportunity to focus too much on the past i liked foreigners everywhere in 2024 but this is the platform for contemporary art and i think it probably is time to pass the mic back to people with established practices who need that moment in the spotlight but i'm sure there are ideas about how to make that more equitable that we have learned from the past year editions so a little bit going back but more educated yeah i mean it's a very interesting contradiction or tension in a certain way in that so many of these artists work with themes of, I would say, post-colonial atonement.

29:08If you were being ungenerous, you would say there's a kind of virtue signaling aspect to a lot of what it does. It's usually made with some sort of like historically charged material, or it's a sculptural or film project. And there's clearly a big hunger to feel better about that past, or at least to feel like there's some sort of cultural reparations being made that these shows seem to be tapping into. And that has manifested in a turn towards the past, but it might be that there is a hunger to kind of reconnect with the present in some kind of a way or to turn the conversation. Although, I mean, it's really not clear.

29:55I guess we'll know when we see the show. Jo, I look forward to seeing you in Venice and seeing how our findings stack up against the actual feeling of the show Yeah, I can't wait It seems particularly mysterious When we had modernist paintings last edition we perhaps knew more what we were in for so I look forward to finding out To an experimental experience The Art Angle is produced by Sonia Manalili with contributions from Ben Davis and Caroline Goldstein Thanks for listening and see you next week You