This project considers how different biennials have impacted the knowledge and understanding of Brazilian contemporary art. Focusing on the representation of Brazilian art within key biennials such as São Paulo, Liverpool, Venice, and Havana, this project asks how the expansion and diversification of the biennial model have impacted knowledge and understanding of the contemporary art of formerly peripheral nations.

Since the 1990s, the biennial field has introduced new genealogies of contemporary art into mainstream knowledge, contributing to a wider post-global epistemological shift (Kompatsiaris, 2017). When formerly marginalised nations are repeatedly represented by a limited number of artists, however, biennials may also produce homogenised perspectives (Ott, 2020; Lee, 2012) and perpetuate exoticizing discourses (Kapur, 2000). The chronological axis of the case studies is defined by the period from the late 1990s to the late 2000s, which coincides with a heightened discourse on the impacts of globalisation on contemporary art and curating and the emergence of a phenomenon commonly referred to as ‘biennalization’ (Tang, 2011; Marchart, 2014). 

This project therefore looks at a tangled fragment of what constituted the representation of Brazilian contemporary art in international biennials and their epistemic claims as a means to reflect on the conditions, strategies, and mediating agents and institutions that have informed and shaped a Brazilian art historical genealogy, as well as contributed to our present understanding of Brazilian contemporary art.