Theme park follies: the publics of art biennials in Dakar and Taipei

ABSTRACT

In yet another variation on a theme park, the contemporary art biennial establishes host cities as cultural destinations. The qualities of these events, their various exclusivities, esoteric referentialities, and circulating stars reflect a form of “pure imageability” (p. xiv) (Sorkin, M. [1992]. Introduction: Variations on a theme park. In M. Sorkin (Ed.), Variations on a theme park: The new American city and the end of public space (pp. xi–xv). Hill and Wang.). Reducing art events to their functions for city branding, marketing, or as a tourist attraction is hardly satisfying as a qualitative analysis reveals their various (sometimes conflicting) intentions. Inspired by Sorkin's writing about public space, this paper considers one of these aims: the engagement of various publics. Bringing in school groups and indigenous rights activists through outreach programs and curation reflects attempts to make biennials more accessible and inclusive. The struggles to expand their publics, however, also reveal entrenched forms of exclusion. Despite political, economic or health crises art biennials persist. Their resilience reinscribes segregated urban lives, a reminder that follies are not necessarily fragile.

KEYWORDS:

• Art biennial
• public space
• audience
• urban studies
• comparative urban research

Of the “artfully hoodwinking forms” of pleasure characterizing Sorkin's theme park, none is perhaps more literally “artfully hoodwinking” than the contemporary art biennial (1992, p. xv). These art events establish new destinations; they boast an urban spectacle worthy of being “put on the map” (McGarry, 2014), and indeed have proliferated “all over the map” (Sorkin, 2011). Beyond their significance in re-shaping the landscape of contemporary art (Altshuler, 2013; Marchart, 2014), contemporary art biennials also represent the force of “pure imageability” in shaping urban change (Sorkin, 1992, p. xv). In cities like Dakar, Gwanjgu, São Paulo, Taipei, among hundreds of others, art biennials have not only proliferated – they have an established legacy of effectively leveraging contemporary art for an enormously broad range of interests and purposes (Filipovic et al., 2010; Gardner & Green, 2014; Kolb et al., 2020; Oren, 2014; Sassatelli, 2017; Tang, 2007). The employment of festivals and cultural events is, at best, a contested instrument to deal with a “panacea” of urban issues (Waitt, 2008).

Yet the contemporary art biennial is not only an instrument, a tourist attraction marketing places in the hackneyed language of urban creativity (Peck, 2005), it also highlights a concern that Sorkin raised decades ago: the resilience of biennials implies a retrenchment of segregated urban lives at times oblivious to the questions of need or everyday city life. In no other realm of the art biennial is this obliviousness more evident than in the desire for “outreach.” Like the urban planners Sorkin decried for their vapid application of public spaces, or as he scathingly described, “the habit of urban designers simply to ornament their projects with the shriveled iconography of assembly” (2011, p. 736), art biennials’ engagements with the public often expose the emptiness of these efforts.

Drawing on research about the Dak’Art in Dakar, Senegal and the Taipei Biennial in Taipei, Taiwan, these public intentions are ubiquitous, if often incoherent. It serves as a reminder of some of the contradictions and tensions Relyea has drawn attention to between the participatory nature of much contemporary art, and its insipid exclusivities (Relyea, 2017). Recognizing the elitism and inaccessibility of contemporary art in general, as well as with their particular art biennials, both Dak’Art and the Taipei Biennial make concerted, tangible efforts to engage the “public.” These brief examples show some of the finer distinctions that are necessary, distinguishing access and accessibility. The expanding and contracting political spaces witnessed in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter protests in cities around the world, as well as the regulation of access to public space due to the pandemic, grants a further urgency to understanding the nuances of publics, politics, and access/accessibility.

School groups at the Dak’ Art

At the opening ceremony of the Dak’Art in 2018, when the President of Senegal entered the auditorium of the Grand National Theater of Dakar, it finally became clear why the photographers were on the stage facing their camera lens to the audience. The president entered from the side of the theater and took a seat in the middle of the audience. As he entered, the other ministers and officials of the biennial seated in his row stood up to applaud, just as everyone stood. Some sections of the audience shouted in support, those seated in front of the president stood and turned around, backlit by the flashing camera lights, and what sounded like a marching band played a theme from the gallery above. Behind the rows where the president and his entourage were seated, and in front of the area where accredited visitors like myself were seated, were several rows of primary school children dressed in uniform. After the spectacle of the Dak’Art opening ceremony, a caravan of school busses awaited the students outside of the theater.

At the center of the biennial edition was the Ancien Palais de Justice, the former ministry repurposed for Simon Njami's exhibit “L’Heure Rouge.” Artists from the continent and the diaspora had installed works in the various rooms, atria, and courtyards of the compound. Material remains of the old ministry mixed with the new materials of the artworks rendered certain rooms and hallways confusing. There were no brochures or maps, except the hefty catalog which likewise offered no guidance through the massive space.

School groups, again, were bussed during the opening days of the biennial exhibition. Lined up in uniform outside of the security, they waited to enter the enormous halls (see Figure 1). The busses were lucky, as I recalled my experience of the confusion with taxi drivers in terms of going to the former “ministry of justice,” which is the art biennial, which they had never heard of. There was no entrance fee, and the students were provided transportation, but I wondered about the lack of orientation available in general, and how this would shape the school groups’ experience.

Figure 1. School groups waiting to enter at the main entrance to the Palais de Justice, the central venue of the 2018 Dak’Art. The theme was “L’Heure Rouge,” and the door and columns had been painted crimson red; above the door, newly posted in red lettering, it read “Une Nouvelle Humanité,” all references artistic director Simon Njami had drawn from the writer Aimé Cèsaire. Photograph by author.

N’Goné Fall, a self-described “concierge of the Dak’Art,” who has advised the ministry officially and unofficially since the inception of the Dak’Art, provided some context by discussing the devastation of structural adjustment in Senegal, which destroyed the cultural education that preceded it (Personal Interview. 8 May 2018). Indeed, the impact of structural adjustment on lowering education investments and outcomes is now well-documented (Reimers, 1994; Vavrus, 2005), and Fall contrasts her childhood in Dakar in the 1970s and 80s with the conditions today. She welcomed the new gesture of bringing schools to the biennial:

Bringing the schools on the exhibition sites that's something new. And from all the different neighborhoods of Dakar, that is something new, but they have to go further. It's not just ‘throw them into the exhibition.’ They will not understand it. It's so overwhelming because it's huge, it's a big exhibition. And so they forgot the pedagogical aspect of it. So some people are intimidated ‘oh you need a PhD in art history so this is not for us’, so a lot of people stopped going to the international exhibition. (Personal Interview. 8 May 2018)

It was clear to her that the way the biennial was exhibited, with no official map, no guides, with little integration to school curricula, there was an enormous difference between making it free and making it accessible. Though the inception of Dak’Art was about claiming space within contemporary art for African artists, the exclusivity of this space remains intransigent decades later. It felt more accessible for curators traveling from Berlin, than for Dakar residents who often did not know where the biennial venues were. Fall recalled outreach that she had done previously, conducting a radio interview about the biennial in Wolof, as an example of all the concrete possibilities available to make the biennial more accessible (Personal Interview, 8 May 2018).

The distinction between making it free, even using a former public government building and bussing in schools to the biennial, and making it accessible, is a longstanding problem within the art world. This is particularly an issue as many biennials are publicly funded or at least partly subsidized. Ntone Edjabe, publisher of Chimurenga and former jury member explains:

It is public, but it's not necessarily accessible. You could tell by who is in there [laughs] … I mean, every museum does that, but I think it's this kind of thing that you have to do, because you have to justify first that you’re a public space. So everyone has an education program, everyone has an outreach program … The access is so periodic, it's so choreographed, that the school bus comes, the children get access for the hour, two, three, the school bus goes, the school bus comes back two years later, you know it's, like, different kids, who for the first time find themselves in this context without the training, reading to engage critically with this stuff, so the fact of just, this school group coming, it ticks the boxes, but, I’m very suspicious of that. (Personal Interview. 4 May 2018)

It ticks the boxes like Sorkin describes, with the iconography of public outreach and accessibility (2011). School children in uniforms are a conspicuous “ornament” in providing a legitimating audience for a publicly funded event. Yet the skepticism that Edjabe suggests speaks to the very tensions at the heart of who Dak’Art is for. Dak’Art is a field configuring event (Fillitz, 2017), an event that makes art history (Altshuler, 2013), that helps define contemporary African art in a context of global black cultural politic (Nzewi, 2018), which has struggled to balance its international ambitions with its continental intentions for decades (Deliss, 1993). Its attempt at outreach feels both insufficient, as Fall explains, and suspect, as Edjabe reveals, because it seems like a folly – something constructed mostly for decoration.

Activists in the marbled hallways

The Taipei Biennial has transformed itself many times in terms of its curatorial structure. For decades, the biennial was produced by partner curators first with the selection of an “international” curator presumably more established, who then worked with an emerging “local” curator in part to train them, or to also help the “international” curator access more “local” artists (Manray Hsu, Personal Interview, 17 November 2018).^[1] This decision of having an “international” curator make the decisions and the “local” curator help produce the biennial has also been described as a “self-colonizing” dynamic and was ended in 2010 (Lu, 2017). Several editions also simply invited solo curators (and their teams), notably the 2020 edition with Bruno Latour. But in 2018, they experimented yet again with a partnership in which the “local” curator, Mali Wu, was chosen first.

Mali Wu is a widely respected Taiwan-based artist, whose socially engaged work is well-known for its context-specificity. Under her curatorship, “Postnature: Museum as Ecosystem” opened with her co-curator Francesco Manacorda, and an unusually large involvement of environmental and activist NGOs. Among them were groups like the Indigenous Justice Classroom, who had been protesting outside of the Presidential Palace in Taipei since February 2017. They were protesting national land reforms that would impinge on the Indigenous Peoples’ Basic Law and had been occupying public space for about 600 days by the time the Taipei Biennial opened in November 2018 (Figure 2).

Figure 2. An activist with the Indigenous Justice Classroom on the ground floor of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum under a tent, with tents hanging from the ceiling above. The prominent location was significant, as an installation that could not be missed. The location also provided a stark difference from their (at the time) ongoing activism in Taipei at the Presidential Palace, where they had been recently moved closer to a subway entrance and had been encamped through all kinds of weather for 600 days to protest infringements on indigenous land by the Taiwanese government. Photograph by author.

On the opening day of the biennial, the curators brought accredited groups of biennial attendees through this installation, located on the ground floor of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). There they had installed the Indigenous Justice Classroom in TFAM, with a protestor in a tent in the center of a marbled hallway with tents hanging above. One of the other artists exhibiting in the biennial had attended their protest in the city and participated in several of their workshops in Taipei described the experience:

I went to the sit-in workshop facilitated by [an activist also involved in the museum installation] at the subway station. It was really, really hot. So, everybody was sweating, we’re all sticky and there was no fan, there was no fan over there and you can see that they probably didn't take a shower for days … one of the organizers, he told me he could only just sprinkle himself with some water on a subway washer. And so, it's a very different kind of relationship to the site. And also the noise from the street because the subway station it is right by a very big street and also on the other side is the Peace Memorial Park, where the local residents would rest and do their nightly walks. And I think what has been making me really invigorated is that dirtiness, the feeling of the sense of body, that we were there and all the condition was not really that welcome and then there were always two cops overlooking what we’re doing 24 h. (Personal Interview, 23 November 2018)

It was a stark contrast to the installation of Indigenous Justice Classroom in TFAM, where the curated activists and tents were situated in an air-conditioned, marbled, and sterile environment. The only onlookers were biennial attendees taking pictures, many of whom needed an explanation about what indigeneity in Taiwan even meant.

The intention to open up the Taipei Biennial to new audiences was important for Mali Wu, “If you encounter any resident from Taipei, most of them don't know about Taipei Biennial, but it's very important for the professional circle. So this time we were trying to reverse it through those NGOs … They are very active in the city, but they don't know about the Taipei Fine Arts Museum” (Personal Interview, 18 November 2018). Recognizing that the TFAM is not a publicly accessible space, they reached out to different actors to bridge some of these gaps. One of the public relations representatives explained that they were also trying to bridge these gaps through new advertising strategies, to broadcast commercials in cinemas and show some of the images from the biennial exhibit. He remarked that their graphic designers did not quite grasp the concept of “Post-Nature: Museum as Ecosystem,” and thought some images would help communicate to the wider public more simply that this was an art exhibition (Personal Interview, 18 November 2018).

These efforts to reach out to the public point out how biennialization, which has in many ways helped to establish new destinations, even a global “shift” in terms of cultural circulations (Bauer & Hanru, 2013; Oren, 2014), has also served to enclose these spaces. A previous biennial curator, who is also based in Taipei, described this distinction between the biennial and the TFAM, “So many, many Taipei residents they go to Taipei Fine Arts Museum on weekends, maybe not going to see the exhibitions, it's like going to your park” (Amy Cheng, Personal Interview, 22 November 2018). As Sorkin has written “our best public spaces are our parks” and the issue of accessibility with the Taipei Biennial pertains more to the biennial than the TFAM as a museum space (2011, p. 183).

2020 Reflections

The proliferation of the biennial, even the biennial fatigue, seems to suggest the presence of an ever-present, still-hungry audience. What becomes clear in these brief examples is that this audience is not the same as the public, or at least not the publics that the biennials feel should come, should be showcased, platformed, and given audience seats next to the president. If the Taipei Biennial wanted to reach out to new publics, then who is the new public that should be enticed by the work of Bruno Latour in 2020?

The way that Disneyland invented a way of encountering the physical world, was something increasingly characteristic of everyday life: a sanitized experience that erases the messiness of the city (Sorkin, 1992, p. 208). Indeed, one could consider the mechanisms of curation, and the instruments of control framing the Indigenous Justice Classroom at the biennial in contrast to the kind of control performed by those two police officers watching them on the streets at the Presidential Palace. A generous interpretation would suggest that the pedagogical impact of forcing indigenous politics on an international audience was precisely the intended outreach of the curator. Yet in sanitizing the protest, the audience lost not only a messiness, but perhaps also a sense of the political determination of their struggle.

In their outreach efforts, maybe Dak’Art serves like the Crystal Palace, in transporting those school children to another reality, a simulated travel to an art world, dislocated from any continent or real place (Sorkin, 1992, pp. 209–210). Sorkin's concern with “a world in which location has been radically destabilized” (2011, p. 546), finds a new kind of illustration in the halls of the Palais de Justice, where the only orientation is name plates in front of rooms with the country or sometimes multiple country affiliations of the artists presenting.

Seen as efforts to expand their publics, these cursory examples also reveal the entrenched walls separating insiders and outsiders. They are not necessarily walls that the biennial has itself erected, but rather a reflection of the enormous gulfs emerging within societies around the world – there are those who circulate, continue to attend art weeks in a pandemic and continue to produce biennials, despite their cultural ministries being shut down by authoritarian populists (Katz, 2020). Some must be transported by commissioned school bus, or perform as a part of an installation, whose conspicuousness lends these exclusive spaces a quality of “public” that had been previously lacking. So the resilience of biennials in a pandemic world implies also the retrenchment of segregated urban lives, a reminder that follies need not be necessarily fragile.

In the wake of global Black Lives Matter protests during a pandemic in 2020, understanding the contracting nature of public space magnifies the conviction of urban activism. It also heightens the contrast between public spaces as political arenas, as people took to the streets to support Black Lives Matter in Taipei and Dakar, and the forms of curated public engagement as installed at the biennials. Though these follies persist, the context of 2020 also reinforces their ornamental attributes, their “shriveled iconography of assembly” (Sorkin, 2011, p. 736) in contrast to the increasing urgency of public space as a shrinking arena of political discourse.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).