Reimagining the cultural impact of neoliberalism: an analysis of Istanbul and Liverpool biennials

ABSTRACT

Biennials are one of the most important stagers of contemporary art practices serving as spaces of reflexivity for artistic production, compressing a glocal sphere, offering a culturally inclusive debate. They play a key role in the global transformation of cultural production in a neoliberal age. Based on empirical data collected from the 15th Istanbul and 10th Liverpool biennials, this paper seeks to interrogate the role they play in the relationship between the cultural production and consumption of the arts. The paper presents an alternative perspective from which we can begin to better understand the cultural impact of neoliberalism. It is suggested, on this basis, that as glocal spaces of culture, biennials can generate culturally inclusive debates and participatory constellations offering a more democratic access to cultural participation. They are in this sense a discursive space and facilitate the opening-up of a critical space in which cultural policy can offer a more sophisticated means of critiquing the impact of neoliberalism on the arts world.

KEYWORDS:

• Glocal
• biennial
• art audience
• neoliberal cultural condition
• cultural engagement

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

Qualitative data that supports the findings of this article can be found at URI: https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/627120

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eda Aylin Genc

Eda Aylin Genc is a cultural professional and a researcher. Her academic research is interdisciplinary in nature and is centered around the production and consumption of culture, cross-cultural policy analysis, implications and challenges of sustainability in the creative sector, and practices of democratic cultural participation. She obtained her MA in Marketing Communications from the University of Westminster and her Ph.D. in Sociology from Manchester Metropolitan University.

Beccy Kennedy-Schtyk

Beccy Kennedy-Schtyk is Senior Lecturer in Art History & Curating at Manchester School of Art, MMU. She specialises in contemporary East Asian diasporic art, Biennialisation and the (post)colonial Gothic. She has curated for Asia Triennial Manchester. Recent publications include: Co-editor – with Paul Gladston and Ming Turner (forthcoming 2021), Visual Culture Wars at the Borders of Contemporary China: Art, Design, Film, New Media and the Prospects of “Post-West” Contemporaneity, London: Palgrave Macmillan, https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9789811652929#aboutBook ; ‘ ‘Woah there a moment. Time out!’: Slowing Down in Clear: A Transparent Novel,’ in Berthold Schoene (ed) (2020) Nicola Barker: Critical Essays, Canterbury:

Gylphi, https://www.gylphi.co.uk/books/Barker.

http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/bkennedy

http://visualisingchineseborders.wordpress.com/

Steven Miles

Steven Miles is Professor of Sociology and author of The Experience Society: Consumer Capitalism Rebooted (Pluto; 2021) and Spaces for Consumption: Pleasure and Placelessness in the Post-Industrial City (Sage; 2010). Professor Miles is Principal Investigator on the Leverhulme Unit for the Design of Cities of the Future (LUDeC) Scholarship programme and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Consumer Culture.