The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society

This is the title of the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville (BIACS 2, Seville, October 26, 2006 – January 15, 2007) and of the accompanying catalogue edited by Okwui Enwezor, the Biennial’s artistic director. Critiques of BIACS 2 were co-ordinated by Plataforma de Reflexión de Políticas Culturales (the Platform for Reflection on Cultural Policies, PRCP), which regarded it as yet another of the more than one hundred biennials worldwide constituting a global system of “biennialization”. This system, they claimed, is highly reliant on corporate sponsorship, indifferent to the local, and the real-estate gentrification of its sites profits investors, not inhabitants. Described as corporate sponsored trade fairs for the international super-rich, PRCP underlined how biennials compete with the museum and gallery system of modernity and modernism as represented by, for example, New York’s MoMA. Arguably, biennials have replaced the latter system in terms of cultural and financial power and act to contain art actions/protests by the contemporary Left, who risk being reduced to peripatetic radicals flying from one international biennial to another.