Yokohama Triennale 2017
International Seminar“CONNECTIVITYAS A
METHOD?
The Future of
Biennales andTriennales”
Report2017 国際「接続
記録集

国際展・芸術祭」

56 Program Outline / Timetable
59 International Seminar“CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD?

The Future of Biennales and Triennales”
60 Keynote Speech“From Naoshima to the Setouchi Triennale”

67 Panel Discussion“CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD?

The Future of Biennales and Triennales”
77 Panelist Profiles
78 Discussions“Where are we now? What are our strategies?
How are we to implement them?”

80 List of Participants
81 Introduction
82 Biennials/Triennials/Festivals in Japan
84 Discussion 1“Why Biennales and Triennales?

New challenges, models and strategies?”
94 Discussion 2“How do we develop professional skills
in biennales and triennales?”103 Discussion Summary

Outline
While we have seen a surge in the number of biennial/triennial/
festivals held in Japan, the number of biennales and triennales aroundthe world has also increased; they have become multi-centric in theirlocations and diverse in their methods.
Since entering the 21st century, recurring exhibitions areworking in the context of a range of social issues such as community
rejuvenation, city branding, tourism and creative industry, in addition
to providing experimental and alternative ways of working with artists
and presenting their works.
In the international seminar “CONNECTIVITY AS A
METHOD? The Future of Biennales and Triennales,” Fukutake
Soichiro, the founder of Benesse Art Site Naoshima, gave a keynote
speech on the fundamental value of art and the new social value thatit generates, based on his experience of developing the pioneeringcontemporary art projects in the Seto Inland Sea area. In the panel
discussion that followed, panelists from São Paulo, Brazil, Istanbul,
Turkey, and Beppu, Japan talked about, not only how biennales/
triennales/festivals respond to diﬀerent social and cultural contexts,
but also about how they connect art with the various aspects in society.
In conjunction with the international seminar, professionals
working in the biennial/triennial/festival sector were invited to share
current issues in the discussion session, “Where are we now? What
are our strategies? How are we to implement them?” One of theagenda,“Why Biennales and Triennales? New challenges, models
and strategies,” was to discuss the various objectives for organizing
such events in the discussion session. The other agenda, “How do wedevelop professional skills in biennales and triennales?,” was to discuss
what kind of organization and skills development is appropriate formaking this sector better, acknowledging that this sector is generally
not institutionalized like a museum.
This document is based on the transcription of the discussions
that took place during the above international seminar and theprofessional discussions.
Organizers:
Organizing Committee for the Yokohama Triennale, Agency for Cultural Affairs
Co-organizer: Yokohama Museum of Art (Yokohama Arts Foundation)
Cooperation: IBA (International Biennial Association)

56

Program Outline / Timetable

International Seminar“ CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD? The Future of Biennales and Triennales ”
Date/Time: September 27, 2017 / 13:30-16:00
Venue:
Lecture Hall, Yokohama Museum of Art
Language: Japanese-English / simultaneous interpretation
No. of Audience: 160［Timetable］

13:30-13:40

Opening Remarks
OSAKA Eriko (General Director, Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale / Director, Yokohama Museum of Art)

13:40-14:30

Keynote Speech “From Naoshima to the Setouchi Triennale”
FUKUTAKE Soichiro (Honorary Adviser, Benesse Holdings, Inc.)

14:30-14:40

Break

14:40-16:00

Panel Discussion “CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD? The Future of Biennales and Triennales”
Panelists:
Thiago de PAULA SOUZA (Member of 10th Berlin Biennale curatorial team / Curator / Educator)
Bige ÖRER (Director, Istanbul Biennale)
YAMAIDE Junʼya (Executive Director of NPO BEPPU PROJECT / Artist)
Moderator: OSAKA Eriko

Discussions“Where are we now? What are our strategies? How are we to implement them?”
Date/Time:
Venue:
Language:

September 27, 2017 / 10:00-12:15
Circular Forum, Yokohama Museum of Art
English［Timetable］

10:00-10:10

Introduction
HOASHI Aki (Project Manager, Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale)

10:10-10:30

Biennales/Triennales/Festivals in JapanIIDA Shihoko (Associate Professor, Tokyo University of the Arts / Curator)

10:30-12:00

Discussion 1* “Why Biennales and Triennales? New challenges, models and strategies”
Facilitator: IIDA Shihoko
Presentations:
1. “Karachi Biennale,” Atteqa MALIK（Vice Chairperson, Karachi Biennale Trust）
2. “Havana Biennial,” Margarita GONZALEZ（Artistic director, 12th Havana Biennial / Vice Director, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam）
3. “Sinopale,” T. Melih GÖRGÜN（Founder and Artistic Director, Sinopale）
4. “African Biennale of Photography (Rencontres de Bamako),” L. Igo DIARRA (Director, La Médina)
Discussion 2* “How do we develop professional skills in biennales and triennales?”Facilitator: HOASHI Aki
Presentations:
1. “Istanbul Biennial,” Bige ÖRER (Director, Istanbul Biennial)
2. “Kochi-Muziris Biennale,” Riyas KOMU (Co-Founder, Kochi Biennale Foundation/ Artist / Curator)
3. “São Paulo Biennale/Berlin Biennale,” Thiago de PAULA SOUZA (Member of 10th Berlin Biennale curatorial team / Curator / Educator)

12:00-12:15

Wrap-up
Facilitator: IIDA Shihoko* Discussions 1 and 2 were held concurrently.
* Affiliation and positions are current as of September 27, 2017.
* Japanese and Chinese names are spelled in the order of family name, given name with some exceptions.

Program Outline / Timetable

57

International Seminar“ CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD?

The Future of Biennales andTriennales ”

Keynote Speech“ From Naoshima to the Setouchi Triennale ”
MC ｜ Good morning everyone. Thank you for coming to thisinternational seminar, “CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD? The
Future of Biennales and Triennales”.
First of all, Iʼd like to invite Osaka Eriko, General Director of
Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale, to give an introduction.
Osaka Eriko [Osaka]｜Thank you for coming to this internationalseminar, “CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD? The Future of
Biennales and Triennales” today. This seminar is commissioned by the
Agency for Cultural Aﬀairs. The title of Yokohama Triennale 2017,“Islands, Constellations & Galapagos”, was chosen to indicate thedesire to connect isolation with imagination, to respect originalityand diversity, and to open up the possibility of coexistence. We haveinvited Mr. Fukutake Soichiro to open todayʼs seminar with his
keynote speech. As you might have already known, Mr. Fukutake is
the Honorary Adviser of Benesse Holdings, as well as the Presidentof Benesse Art Site Naoshima. He is the driving force behind thepioneering project that brings architecture, art, and nature together
on various islands, starting with Naoshima in Kagawa prefecture. I
would like Mr. Fukutake to share with us his thoughts and activities
as this project has given new value to the islands and garnered muchinternational attention. After the keynote speech, we will then pause

60

Keynote Speech “ From Naoshima to the Setouchi Triennale ”

for a break, then gather again for the second-half of todayʼs session
where we have invited three panelists from Brazil, Turkey, and Japan to
introduce their diverse activities in their countries. At the same time, I
would like all of us to explore the social significance and possibilities ofinternational exhibitions. I really hope that everyone will stay aroundtill the end. Thank you for your attention.
MC｜I would like to introduce our keynote speaker for today, Mr.

Fukutake Soichiro, Honorary Adviser, of Benesse Holdings. The titleof his keynote speech is “From Naoshima to the Setouchi Triennale”.
Mr. Fukutake, please.
Fukutake Soichiro [Fukutake]｜Thank you for inviting me to todayʼsseminar. Before I start, I would first like to show you a 5-minute video
clip of Benesse Art Site Naoshima.

From Naoshima to the Setouchi Triennale: Regional
revitalization through contemporary art
Fukutake｜I would like to talk about regional revitalization throughcontemporary art. First of all, Benesse Art Site Naoshima is actually
the collective term for all art activities conducted by Fukutake

Foundation and Benesse Holdings on the three islands of Naoshima,
Inujima, and Teshima. But before I go into that, Iʼd like to talk a little
about each island first.
Our art activities have begun in 1987, which is exactly 30 years
ago from now. This is a photo of Naoshima taken in 1986; there werebarely any trees growing there.[1] And it is said that the reason for thisis the sulfur dioxide gas that used to be continuously discharged froma copper refinery on the island. The copper refinery has been operating
for exactly a century, since 1917. The population of Naoshima iscurrently 3,200, but there were as many as 7,800 people living there
once. In a photo of Naoshima in 1953, you can see plumes of smoke
and gas being discharged into the air.
Inujima also used to have a copper refinery that operated only
for 10 years, from 1909 to 1919. It was also a quarrying island that
supplied the cornerstones for Osaka Castle, among others. Inujima isa small island with a perimeter of merely 4 km but at its peak, there
were 5 to 6,000 people living there. Currently, there are only about
25 residents and their average age is over 70 years.
Next is Teshima. Teshima was a victim of massive illegal
industrial waste dumping amounting to over 900,000 tons over 16
years since 1975, the cleanup of which was only recently completed.
There are about 900 residents now but at its peak, there were about
3,600 people living there. Currently, the residents are protesting toprevent the installation of a solar power facility in Teshima because it
would destroy the natural landscape.
The development of Naoshima all started when my father,
Fukutake Tetsuhiko and the former mayor of Naoshima, Miyake
Chikatsugu met and agreed on a plan to develop a camping site
for children on the island. That was back in 1985, but my father
unfortunately passed away while the plan was being drafted. So, I
moved back from Tokyo to my hometown in Okayama, and took overthis project as well as the family business. In the beginning, I decided
to build the camping site, and asked Ando Tadao to supervise theproject. There is a reason why I chose Ando. During my numerous
trips to Naoshima, I came to realize that excessive urbanization andmodernization had polluted and damaged the once beautiful islands
which then led to depopulation, in spite of the fact that the areaaround these islands was the first to be designated as a national park inJapan. The most beautiful place in Japan had been subjected to such,shall we say, savage treatment, with no concern whatsoever under

the guise of building a modern society. This filled me with extreme
indignation, and I decided to kick-oﬀ the project of developing
Naoshima, which is still ongoing today, as a form of resistance toprotest against excessive modernization and industrialization andrural-to-city migration. Resistance will require weapons, and because
I canʼt use cannons, so I have decided to use contemporary art as myweapon of choice instead. I decided not to hire an architect who lives
in Tokyo, the virtual enemy of my resistance. Instead, I contacted
Ando Tadao, who lives in Osaka city and was also once a professional
boxer. The collaboration with him continues to this day, and I thinkit went really well. As I travelled regularly to Naoshima and theSeto Inland Sea, I started to think diﬀerently about a lot of things. I
was particularly influenced by a research paper written by Professor
Nishida Masanori from Nara Prefectural University called Oubei-jin
ni yoru Setonaikai no Fukei-kan (Discovering the Seto Inland Sea by EuroAmericans). In this paper, he quotes the German geologist, Ferdinand
von Richthofen: “This region is already Heaven on earth” (translated
from Japanese). A certain Madame Vincent also praised this in her
book, “Amongst the numerous travel courses, there is probably noother place that is as beautiful as the Seto Inland Sea”.* But I guess weJapanese are a particular bunch of people that is painfully oblivious
to the majestic beauty and goodness right before our eyes, since we
can do such terrible things as I mentioned earlier.
The first thing that Iʼd asked Ando to design was Benesse House,
which was built in 1992. It is the first hotel in the world where guests
can relax and enjoy being surrounded by nature and art.
This is one of the most iconic works of Naoshima, Pumpkin, by
Kusama Yayoi.[2] This artwork was installed in an outdoor exhibition
titled “Out of Bounds,” which was held in Naoshima in 1994. At
that time, I had received great advice from Miki Akiko and Nanjo
Fumio – both who have experiences in directing this triennale – onwhat type of artworks would be good for outdoor exhibition. Thisis the representative work of Bruce Nauman, 100 Live and Die. Thisis a series of seascapes, Time Exposed, by Sugimoto Hiroshi. In his
photographs, you can see the horizon of the earth, but that horizon
line is actually also aligned with the horizon of the Seto Inland Sea. I
think that this artwork is expressing the fact that although Naoshima
is a tiny island, it is connected to the seas of the world.
This will appear again later, but the artwork titled Cultural
Melting Bath is by Chinaʼs Cai Guo-Qiang, who took the 1st Benesse

12Southern Naoshima, 1986

Kusama Yayoi, Pumpkin, 1994
Keynote Speech “ From Naoshima to the Setouchi Triennale ”

61Prize. There are Taihu rocks from China, a Coleman jacuzzi from
America, and Japanese scenery; entering the bathtub will allow thevisitor to have views of diﬀerent things. In an artwork by Yanagi
Yukinori, titled The World Flag Ant Farm 1990, where ants dig nests
into flags made of sand, making their borders equivocal. The point of
this artwork is to pose the question: What exactly defines a nation?
We have David Hockneyʼs A Walk Around the Hotel Courtyard
Acatlan. Being an island, Naoshima is naturally surrounded by thesea. To contrast that, we installed a big painting of the Mexican hotel,
Hotel Acatlan, in the Benesse House. We also invited Richard Long,and he created this artwork out of the driftwood collected around
Naoshima. This is a work we commissioned to Jannis Kounellis.[3]He was initially hesitating as to what to create for us when he cameto Japan. But the story goes that as he worked with the local students
and had meals with them, the futomaki (thickly-rolled sushi covered
with seaweed) they were eating gave him the inspiration which led
to the creation of this artwork: instead of seaweed, he used lead tocover the roll. Kounellis collected things that were used once and thendumped by people in Naoshima to be rolled into the lead. The work
originally covered the wall to the top, but it gradually got compressed
due to its heavy weight.
Another project that weʼre working on in Naoshima is the Art
House Project, where we restore traditional Japanese houses andconvert them into contemporary art works. The first house withthe work (Sea of Time ’98) was created by Miyajima Tatsuo in 1998,
where a run-down building was restored, and turned into a gallery.
The 125 digital counters used in this work were set in a “timesetting” workshop in which the locals were asked to participate, theartist thereby creating the artwork together with local residents. This
work also contributed to our activities being accepted by the local
population. It is not like we were accepted from day one, it took us
almost ten years to gain such trust. So, this work is really one of theartworks that brought us and the islandʼs inhabitants together.
This is Goʼo Shrine.[4] I think this is a commemorative workthat turned Sugimoto Hiroshi into an architect from a photographer.
I have some personal memories from this work. The old shrine
was in such decay that it was falling apart, and the people from thehouseholds that support the shrine asked if I could do something
about. I replied, “Sure, but it comes with one condition. Can you
let a contemporary artist rebuild this shrine?” This created an uproar
which was followed by many arguments and disputes. But in the end,
we managed to get it rebuilt. Although this is a shrine that symbolizes
Shintoism, it is the first shrine built by a contemporary artist since
Ise Jingu was built.
As for Minamidera, while weʼve simply taken the name of atemple and used it on a new building here, a temple originally did
exist here. Ando built a timber structure and James Turrell created
Backside of the Moon inside, an artwork of darkness.

Museums Located on Different Islands in the Seto
Inland Sea
I would like to talk a little about the Chichu Art Museum, that wascompleted in 2004.[5] As you can see from the slide, you wonʼt be able
62

Keynote Speech “ From Naoshima to the Setouchi Triennale ”

3Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1996

4

Art House Project “Goʼo Shrine”
Sugimoto Hiroshi, Appropriate Proportion, 2002

5

Chichu Art Museum, Architecture: Ando Tadao

to see the building from above the ground. Our idea of buildings isoften something that is constructed on the ground and goes upwards,
in which the design of the architect is transformed and encapsulated
in the building or structure itself. I therefore think that this museum isa groundbreaking feat even in the architectural world. We decided tobuild the art museum underground out of respect for the surrounding
nature, and as a space where one can reflect on spiritual matters or
look deep within oneself. The impetus for building this museum
is the large 2m(h) × 6m(w) Monet painting which I was able topurchase in 2000. At that time, I already owned two Monet Water
Lilies paintings, 1m(h) × 2m(w). After I managed to acquire this6

Chichu Art Museum

7

Naoshima Bath “I♥湯”, Ohtake Shinro, 2009

8

Naoshima Hall, Architecture: Sambuichi Hiroshi / Owner: Naoshima
Townlarge painting, I subsequently purchased two more, 2m(h) × 2m(w),which are hung on both sides of the diptych. It took me 22 years
long to collect these five Water Lilies paintings. After I obtained theMonet diptych, I told Ando, James Turrell, and Walter De Maria that
I would like to build a highly spiritual, and in a certain sense, a 21st
century cathedral-like space. The three of them were very interested
in my idea; Walter De Maria and James Turrell subsequently createdtheir artworks inclusive of the space housing them.
There are three elements to the Chichu Art Museum: nature,architecture, and art.[6] The most suitable architectural space and themost suitable natural environment serve to maximize the expressivity

emanating from the artworks in this museum. Even though theactivities we conduct in Naoshima are not large-scale, and we do nothave a lot of capital funding, I wanted to build a museum that would
be highly acclaimed by the world. And in order to achieve that, I
was very sure that I did not want to exhibit the artworks in a typicalwhite cube space, but rather, I wanted to create the best combinationof architecture and nature to fully bring out the excellence of eachindividual artwork instead. And I still believe in this today. This may
be one of the reasons why Naoshima became so well-known despite
the fact that itʼs just a tiny island.
This is Naoshima Bath “I♥YU”, a work created by Ohtake
Shinro.[7] Those of you who have visited Naoshima may have visited
this bathhouse. For those who havenʼt, I would urge you to visit andtake a dip for yourself. Itʼs a sensational public bathing space where
one can experience contemporary art naked, a first in the world.
This is the Lee Ufan Museum. I was able to get this built because
Lee and Ando are very close friends. I think that the simple works by
Lee and Andoʼs architecture match really well. This building also isbuilt half-underground.
The ANDO MUSEUM was built in 2013, by tearing down a
traditional Japanese house that was about 100 years old, constructing
an inner space made of concrete inside which Andoʼs representativearchitectural models are nestled, before finally covering it with theold house using building elements from the original structure.
This is the Naoshima Hall by Sambuichi Hiroshi that was built
in 2015.[8] The air inside is circulated relying solely on natural energy.
It won the 2017 Wallpaper Design Award in the Best New Public
Building category. This is the first time that a Japanese architect hasreceived this accolade. In the very same year, the Naoshima Hall also
won the Architectural Design Prize awarded by the Architectural
Institute of Japan.
This is the Inujima Seirensho Art Museum that was built
by Sambuichi earlier in 2008. It won both the Japan Institute ofArchitects Grand Prize in 2010 as well as the Architectural Design
Prize in 2011 awarded by the Architectural Institute of Japan. Thevery expressive artworks exhibited inside are created by Yanagi
Yukinori, who used elements from Mishima Yukioʼs house, which I
owned, as a motif. Mishima died in 1970, and in that very same year,
Osaka Expo started. This may be a personal conjecture, but I thinkthat 1970 was a turning point for Japan. From there, Japan modeled
itself after the United States in placing the economy above everythingelse. I think the artworks in the Inujima Seirensho Art Museum carrya strong message with respect to that.
This is the Teshima Art Museum, which was completed in 2010.
It has been said that this museum revolutionized the very concept
of “art museum“. It was designed by Nishizawa Ryue, and theartwork inside is by Naito Rei. The Teshima Art Museum won theArchitectural Design Prize from the Architectural Institute of Japan in
2012. As you can see from the picture, this landscape is surroundedwith terraced rice paddy fields that used to be abandoned and were
restored by my staﬀ together with island residents. The art museum,
overlooking the Seto Inland Sea, was built in a corner of the restored
rice paddies. The museum takes the shape of a water droplet and I
think that it embodies the great relationship with the surrounding sea
Keynote Speech “ From Naoshima to the Setouchi Triennale ”

63and terraced rice paddy fields. In Teshima, we also have the Teshima
Yokoo House (Yokoo Tadanori) and a work by Sputniko!, as well as Laforêt des murmures by Christian Bolatanski, which was produced lastyear.

Appraisals of Setouchi from abroad
I will talk a little about our achievements here. We are receiving a lotof visitors from abroad and more than 60% of our hotel guests areforeign visitors. I was very happy to discover the article publishedby the American Condé Nast Traveler magazine in 2,000 titled “TheNext Seven Wonders” – places in the world that one should visit– Naoshima Island was one of them, together with Paris, Berlin,
Alexandria, Bilbao, Rio, and Dubai. I was extremely surprised when
I saw that Naoshima made the list. At that time, the Chichu Art
Museum was not yet built so the island residents were also extremely
pleased with this. I think this magazine is probably on display in the
mayorʼs oﬃce. I believe the mayor was also very pleased. In the very
popular guidebook Lonely Planet, Naoshima is listed at 6th among
Japanʼs 12 best destinations too.
In an article released in the French magazine, artpress, where
the term “Naoshima Method” was first coined, in 2010, to define
our method of revitalizing a damaged rural area and its community
through art. This term is now gaining recognition around the world.
Perhaps in the history of art, there were not many depopulatedareas that were revitalized through contemporary art. So, in thatsense, I think our activities on Naoshima represent a completely
new and unparalleled way to use art and this may be why it is sohighly appraised. Right now, I am involved in a project to revitalize a
mountain village in China using the Naoshima Method. It is a small
village called Peach Flower Island in the Shandong province and weare going to use art to recreate old houses that were built in the Ming
dynasty. I am told that if this project turns out well, it might branchout to other rural areas in China, too. As you already know, one of the
big issues that China faces is the huge disparity between urban andrural areas. Even if they were to attempt to attract various industries tolevel out the economic disparity, it will not work out. The “imported”
industry will become obsolete in 10 yearsʼ time, and such regional
revitalization through the establishment of industries will become athing of the past since the factories will fall into ruins the moment
they stop operating. However, for this new method of revitalization
through art, I would like to help them out as much as I possibly can.

Naoshima Method : The Way to Become Happy
Throughout this 30-year-long process, I have learned a few things
that Iʼd like to share with all of you. Just as I have mentioned in the
beginning of my speech, I would like to display art in its best form,
so I pay great attention to the architecture and nature. In the processof repeatedly doing this I realized that, even though itʼs been said thatthe present day is the era of the cities, this is definitely not true. I thinkthat only in the countryside can we find the history and culture of acountryʼs regions, in other words, its identity. Especially this island– while the original scenery and landscape of Japan were left intact64

Keynote Speech “ From Naoshima to the Setouchi Triennale ”

since the island was not damaged during the war, it was slowly fadingin obscurity, suﬀering from depopulation and an aging population. I
really could not bear to see this continuing and my feelings about thishave thus carried me this far in my journey of regional revitalization
through art. I will talk about this later, and how it is eventuallyconnected to the Setouchi Triennale.
So, I really learned quite a few things from my interaction
with the island residents through our activities. My father passed
away when I was 40 years old. I returned to Okayama from Tokyoand subsequently visited many islands and talked to various people.
And I noticed that on these islands, there were no information,no entertainment; nothing. The contrast between the islands andmodern cities such as Okayama and Tokyo was stark. However,
the island residents looked so happy to me. I looked at them and I
thought, what exactly is true happiness, what is true richness? So,
I changed the name of our company from Fukutake Publishing
to Benesse, derived from the Latin words “bene” and “esse,” or“living well.” The sales of our company actually skyrocketed, andwe were able to go ahead with new business developments without
any hesitation. I believe that the development of Naoshima and thechange in our companyʼs name led to our business success.
So how do we become happy? I have some answers of my own.
Not just myself, but I believe that everyone in this world, including
those of you seated here, want to become happy. But this is easier said
than done. Some of us devote ourselves to various religions, someof us are told that we will be happy if we donate, or that the world
beyond this is heaven. But the thing is, has anyone of us met someone
who has gone to heaven and come back to tell us how wonderful it
was? I donʼt know about you, but I personally have not. That might
be true though, but no one knows for sure unless she or he has died.
However, Iʼd rather create paradise on this earth instead. So, I triedand discovered a way to create paradise here. And the answer is simply
this: in order to be happy, we need to live in a happy community. I
am pretty sure that we cannot find a happy community in big cities
where the strong ones dominate and the weak ones get oppressed.
City life is really about survival of the fittest. But that may very wellbe the exciting side about living in a city.
I believe that in order to be happy, one needs to live in a happy
community. But what exactly does a happy community mean? To me,a happy community is a community that is filled with the smiles ofseniors, who are masters of life. Using contemporary art on Naoshima
has transformed the island into one that is overflowing with smilingseniors. And everyone living there truly became more energetic andspry. The island also became more beautiful. I found it really wondefulthat a depopulating island could experience such a turn-aroundthrough contemporary art, and I ended up staying in Naoshima for
longer and longer periods, until I migrated to New Zealand sevenyears ago. By the way, New Zealand is a wonderful place.
So, what is the Naoshima Method? Simply put, the artists visit
Naoshima and produce works there. They might spend two weeks to amonth in Naoshima as they create artworks. During their stay on theisland, the elderly folks would look after them and take care of theirvarious needs even though, for international artists for example, bothparties do not understand each otherʼs language. But body language

helps in communication. They have tea together, they eat together, theseniors invite them over for afternoon tea sessions or a warm bath...
through this continuous interaction, the islanders get to understandthe works of the artists, know their backgrounds – in short, they get
to directly listen to the artistsʼ voices. The artists then leave their works
behind on the island. When young people from the cities visit, since
we donʼt provide captions or booklets explaining what the artworks
mean in Naoshima, the visitors would start to ask, “Whatʼs this? What
does this mean?” Then the seniors who had helped the artists would
quietly approach the visitors and proudly explain, “Ah, this artworkis created by so-and-so...” This often surprises and stuns the young
people, and the seniors love to see that look on those young faces.
These seniors gradually start to gain confidence, and start to weave
their own narratives and to share the history of the island with thevisitors. Their confidence starts to build again, and this transforms
them into happy, spry elderly folks. This, my friends, is the secret of
the Naoshima Method.
Now Iʼd like touch on Public Interest Capitalism, in which
the stakeholders, Fukutake Foundation, Benesse Holdings and myfamily, ensure the sustainable operation of our activities. Benesse owns
many artworks. I established the Fukutake Foundation and made it
one of the major shareholders of Benesse Holdings, where the stock
dividends also go to operating the Foundation. Of course, part of theincome also comes from museum admission fees and sales of goods.
The Fukutake family also purchases large artworks and donates themto the museums.
What I would like to insist on is that while regional revitalizationor cultural promotion activities often rely on donations, such
donations tend to be sporadic, and I find it also awkward to haveto keep on bowing when you are actually doing good things. In ourage, most of the wealth creation is realized through corporate activity.
With public interest capitalism, part of the shares of corporations are
gifted to public interest foundations, who use dividend streams fromsuch shareholdings to promote regional revitalization and cultural
promotion in a stable and systematic way. Doing so will enable us toshift from “financial capitalism” to “public interest capitalism”.
You probably already know about Maslowʼs hierarchy of needs
where the top layer is self-actualization. Self-actualization is linked
to the financial capitalism that we see in America; we now live in aworld where money is king, and everyone is obsessed with getting
rich. But the truth is, Maslow envisioned another layer on top of
self-actualization in the 1950s, and that is the desire to develop oneʼscommunity. Self-transcendence is not doing what one wants to do,but to further improve oneself or better oneʼs community. That is themost important thing and it is a very important concept for me.

Key Features of Setouchi TriennaleIʼd now like to talk briefly about the Setouchi Triennale, which started
in 2010. It was held in seven islands in the beginning. The Triennale is
now held in 12 islands as well as two port cities, Takamatsu and Uno.
Because our activities in Naoshima, Inujima and Teshima had beenso successful, other islands also were keen to do something alike. The
third edition of the Setouchi Triennale took place last year, exhibiting

206 artworks from 34 countries and regions. A special format of the
Triennale is that the event is held in three seasons; spring, summer,and fall, because we want everyone to experience the beauty of Japanin these three seasons. So, we had artists hailing from China, Korea,
Taiwan, Thailand... This is by Yoda Yoichiro from Japan; the workis called Island Theatre Megi. We also got this structure installed onanother island called Ogijima. This is an artwork by Toyofuku Ryo
installed on Ibukijima, an island famous for their anchovies. There
were many, many other artworks exhibited too.
For the Setouchi Triennaleʼs third edition, over 1,040,000
cumulative visitors came, and this is the economic impact it exerted
in the region. Our original aim for the Triennale was to revitalize theislands. But with the number of visitors we had and the near 14 billion
yen of economic impact measured, something really miraculous
happened. On the small island of Ogijima where the population is
only about 140, the elementary school that had closed for three years
was reopened, and about 40 people moved there, with another 50
people said to be on a waiting list. In Shodoshima, an island with apopulation of under 30,000, 1,400 people have moved in to live on
the island. Islanders and outsiders and artists come together to workon various ideas, and the chemistry worked, I suppose, so they truly
revitalized these islands. So, I think in this way, we did achieve ourobjective of revitalizing the islands with contemporary art.
Again, the Triennale promotes the culture of the region and thisincludes food. Trained cooks and chefs from all around the country,
including Tokyo, traveled to the region and these islands teachingcooking methods to the locals, who in turn started serving wonderful
local delicacies to visitors.
The outline of the fourth edition of the Setouchi Triennale (in2019) has now been decided. It will be held on the same 12 islands,
the festival will be somewhat shorter in the summer but longer in thefall.

Departure from the economically-driven societyIʼd like to talk about the Benesse Prize now. The Benesse Prize
has been awarded at the Venice Biennale from 1995 to 2013. The
winner for the 1st edition was Cai Guo-Qiang, the 2nd awardee
was Alexandros Psychoulis, the 3rd was Olafur Eliasson, the 5th
was Rirkrit Tiravanija, the 6th Tacita Dean, and the 10th was Anri
Sala... Many wonderful artists have been awarded with the Benesse
Prize so far and continued developing successful careers. This is theartwork by the first Benesse Prize winner, Cai Guo-Qiang. This is thework commissioned to the 4th Benesse Prize winners, Janet Cardiﬀ& George Bures Miller, an installation inside Benesse House. AnriSala, the 10th Benesse Prize winner, created this work. From 2016
onwards, we have shifted the Benesse Prize from Europe to Asia.
This is merely my own view and perhaps I am biased, but I believethat now is the age of Asia rather than that of the West. The West is
stalling, lost in the financial capitalism I was criticizing earlier. Moneyis overflowing, and people are scurrying around in their best eﬀort
to get as much as they can. But, I think the idea of people in Asia tolove nature, this value of living in harmony with nature is important.
Also, in order to promote the idea of public interest capitalism in lieu
Keynote Speech “ From Naoshima to the Setouchi Triennale ”

65

of financial capitalism – and spreading this new concept from Asia – I
decided to shift my focus and to award the Benesse Prize in Singapore
from 2016 onwards.
The 11th Benesse Prize was awarded last year to a female Thai
artist Pannaphan Yodmanee. There were also many other wonderfulartworks. It made me truly feel that we definitely now entered the ageof Asia.
To close, I would like to share three key points that I havelearned from my 30 years of experience of conducting art activities in
Naoshima and in the Seto Inland Sea. The most important thing that I
have learned is that Nature is manʼs best teacher. No number of books
can teach a person more than Nature. The most important thing is
Nature. I think that we, humans, after all, are creatures that need
Nature to be truly alive. Of course, material things and information
and recreation are important too, but I think that the cornerstone ofcontemporary society should not be based on that. I truly believe andfeel strongly about this. I also want to stress the importance of theconcept of “using what exists to create what is to be.” I believe that
economic development will start from there. Contemporary societyon the other hand, is an economy-driven society, which believes increating new things by destroying what already exists.
I personally believe that this economy-centric contemporary
perspective is actually very dangerous. There is a lot of building
construction going on in Tokyo now; the number will shock you.
But in another 50, 60 years, all these buildings will be gone. And
then what happens? Theyʼre going to build again. Japan is a country
without much resource, yet we continue to repeat the cycle of reconstruction. But if you look at the buildings in Europe, they are
made of stone and stand for centuries. I live in New Zealand now, but
in New Zealand, people donʼt think about construction or housing
depreciation. But because we Japanese think about depreciation, wetend to care only for the short duration of the depreciation cycle. I
firmly believe that such a way of thinking is wrong. This is because
while we are conducting various activities including creative ones –even if we do manage to produce some kind of achievement in our
lifetime, for example by focusing on this idea of using what exists tocreate what is to be, these things will eventually be destroyed by thenext generation. And I donʼt think that this is a very pleasant thought.
If we could just pause for a while and think about this: themodernization that has happened in Japan for the past 100 odd
years – even if we were to start from the Meiji era – or the past
two centuries if we include America – if we just take a look at thepast two or three centuries of history; and on the other hand lookat the historical artefacts produced in Europe and China, or the old
historical artefacts produced in Japan such as temples, shrines, castles,
castle walls or old buildings, you know, a countryʼs cultural heritage.
But in our current contemporary world, is Japan producing anythingthat can be remembered as a cultural asset in say two or three centuries
from now? In short, while the world sees Japan as a country with asophisticated culture, I no longer agree. Have we not already drainedand exhausted all the cultural heritage that was created since the olddays up to the Edo era? I might be going too far, but even our countryʼscultural budget is not that big. I guess what I am trying to say here is
this: if we do not deeply care about culture, any country will simply
66

Keynote Speech “ From Naoshima to the Setouchi Triennale ”

lose its identity.
Sad to say, I think that the next generation and era, including
the corporations that create wealth, are not really interested in culture.
I want to insist on the idea that the economy is a servant to culture.
The societies of today, especially Japanʼs, are all chasing after one
thing: economy. Economy, economy, economy... Of course, I knowthat economy is important. If the countryʼs economy is not doing
well, then thereʼs no tax revenue. If thereʼs no tax revenue, the welfare
system isnʼt going to work. I know all this very well. But, wasnʼt
there a time, when people were saying “Japan as Number One”? Eventhen, people didnʼt really think or care about culture. To go a little bit
further, the various buildings that were constructed in that time weredestroyed one after another, even the National Stadium. So, I think,even when Japan was at the peak of its economic growth, nobody
cared about culture. No one was interested in culture. And I find thatreally strange. Because once we lose our culture, we will lose the very
foundation that the country is built on. I believe that culture is thefoundation for our community and our country. So, in this respect,
I think that economy should be a servant to culture.
As Iʼve mentioned at the start of my presentation, as myresistance against contemporary society – albeit conducted on a small
island called Naoshima – Iʼve been conducting these activities forthe past 30 years, and Iʼve talked to various artists and architects – I
truly believe that Nature is manʼs best teacher. It is important to use
what exists to create what is to be, and to understand that economy
is a servant to culture. I think these ways of thinking are extremely
important. From the bottom of my heart, I truly believe so. As Iʼve
mentioned earlier, I would like to help people in China and in othercountries who share such values, however much I can.
This concludes my presentation. Thank you for your attention.
MC｜Thank you Mr. Fukutake. So that is the end of the keynote

speech, “From Naoshima to the Setouchi Triennale”.

* English quotes translated from Japanese text that appears in NISHIDA Masanoriʼs Modern
Westerners Admiration of the Seto Inland Sea Landscape, The Japanese Institute of LandscapeArchitecture, NII-Electronic Library Service: https://ci.nii.ac.jp/els/contentscinii_20180202144828.
pdf?id=ART0006477169

Panel Discussion“ CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD?

The Future of Biennales and Triennales ”

MC｜Now we would like to begin the panel discussion “CONNEC-

TIVITY AS A METHOD? The Future of Biennales and Triennales”,
facilitated by Ms. Osaka, General Director of Organizing Committee
for Yokohama Triennale.
Osaka｜From here, I would like to ask our three panelists toshare their stories with some questions from me. First of all, let me
introduce the three panelists. The person next to me is Mr. Yamaide
Junya, Executive Director of BEPPU PROJECT. Next to him is BigeÖrer, Director of Istanbul Biennial. Next to her is, Thiago de Paula
Souza who is engaged in many activities mainly in Berlin and São
Paolo. First, each of them will give a 10 to 15 minutes of presentation.
We will start with Thiago de Paula Souza.

Berlin Biennale / São Paulo Biennale
Thiago de Paula Souza [de Paula Souza]｜Hello, good afternoon,
everybody. Thanks very much for coming. Iʼm Thiago. I live inSão Paulo, and Iʼll bring some ideas and some impressions of myexperience, my background working in arts there, and then Iʼll finish
bringing some information about the Berlin Biennale and what weare planning for next year.

Bienal São Paulo was founded in 1951, with the special support
by the local elites. It is the second oldest art biennial in the world after
the Venice Biennale. If you look at this picture, you can see Ibirapuerapark, that is a huge urban park, with buildings designed by Oscar
Niemeyer, a popular Brazilian modernist architect. The park opened
during the celebration of 400th anniversary of São Paulo. Itʼs locatedin a very wealthy district.
The pavilion, a beautiful architecture by Oscar Niemeyer
is where the São Paulo Biennale usually takes place. So all thesestructures were built by Niemeyer. In the park is also the Museu Afro
Brasil. It is the Afro-Brazilian Museum where I used to work as an
educator. So we have several structures, and several monuments thatwere built in the same period, at the same moment, in this park. And
probably the most famous one is this: Monument to the Bandeiras.
It was a sculpture by Victor Brecheret. This monument is honoring
the 17th-century Bandeiras, or a Portuguese word for the settlersʼ
expeditions into the countryside, into the deeper Brazil. And thesemen, who have been represented here, they are considered heroes fora lot of people in Brazil. At least, in the oﬃcial narratives, or oﬃcial
history that is the case. But now that we are here in 2017, we need
to be very honest, we need to reveal this history, and we need to face
the fact that these men were murderers. In this process to go deep

Panel Discussion “ CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD? The Future of Biennales and Triennales”

67into Brazil, to go deep into the countryside, they were responsible forkilling thousands of native population, and also the black enslaved
people who were forced to join them.
Well, the same sculpture is still there. But some people are very
aware of how violent these monuments are; all the violence that themonument represents. And diﬀerent groups of artists, diﬀerent social
movements have been playing with it. We cannot destroy it right now.
I personally think that this monument should be destroyed as anyother monuments that somehow honor the history of colonialism,
but it will not happen soon, so an interesting approach would be toplay with it.
This is what happened to the same sculpture during the gay
parade last year.[1] GUARANI was the major native populationfrom São Paulo who were killed by these men, in the name of “theprogress”. This was a very interesting uprise that occurred a year anda half ago in São Paulo. So basically, people took the monument forthis so-called heroes and tried to reorganize the history.
Iʼm talking about the park and about the monument because
I want to get to Museu Afro Brasil, the place I used to work as an
educator. Museu Afro Brasil is a very new museum. It was foundedin 2004. The aim of the museum is to break the narratives of theblack people represented in museums or represented in oﬃcial history
which, in most cases, is seen from the perspectives of the black people
related to slavery or the slavery past. In other cases, black people would
be shown in an exotic context, based on a harmonious vision, covering
or ignoring the underlying conflicts. Museu Afro Brasil promotes theperspective concerning the African-Brazilian arts and culture fromthe blackʼs point of view and tries to produce a narrative that searches
for a more complex manner to look at history.

Through this point of view, the mediation, or the educators
search for a diﬀerent way to look at history, which presumes opening
up another dialogue between the collection, visitors and between
several social actors. As a result, it can create an open and interactive
system for constructing narratives to develop criticality. That is ourhope. Raising a wide range of debates concerning identity, culturalrepresentations, and the possible ways to look at history, Brazilian
history and colonial history in South America.
So last year, the 32nd edition of the Bienal São Paulo, orSão Paulo Biennial, was held. It was curated by Jochen Volz from
Germany, Gabi Ngcobo from South Africa, and Júlia Rebouças from
Brazil, Lars Bang Larsen from Denmark, and Sofía Olascoaga from
Mexico. It was called “INCERTEZA VIVA” or “Life Uncertainty”
and it proposed to look at notions of uncertainty and the strategies
oﬀered by contemporary art to embrace or inhabit it. I like theirstatement, which said something like, “While stability is understoodas a remedy against anxiety, uncertainty is generally avoided ordenied.”This is a view of the exhibition hall. As I told you in the
beginning, this building is in the park, Ibirapuera park. And we cansee the Frans Krajcberg installation. Before the exhibition opened, thecurators organized what we call the first public program and it wascalled Study Days. It was part of the research to organize, in fact, thepublic activities that would lead to the exhibition itself.
“Accra Study Days” was organized by one of the co-curators,
Gabi Ngcobo, who is now the 10th Berlin Biennale curator. Jochem
Volz was also there in Accra with us. We went to Accra in Ghana,and I think probably you might be asking, “Why Accra?” There wereseveral other cities that was part of the Study Days, such as Llamas inThiago de PAULA SOUZA(Member of 10th Berlin Biennale curatorial team / Curator / Educator)

68

Panel Discussion “ CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD? The Future of Biennales and Triennales”

1

Monument to the Bandeiras and the gay parade

2

Brazil House, Jamestown

Peruvian Amazon, Santiago in Chile, Cuiabá in Mato Grosso, Brazil.
We went to Accra for a very special reason.
In January of 1835, a sizable number of African slaves in
Salvador da Bahia orchestrated an uprising, known historically as
the most significant slave rebellion in Brazil. In Portuguese we callit “Revolta dos Malês” or the “Malê Revolt”. All the same, thisrevolutionary episode is reported to have led to bloodshed killing
many lives, arrests, executions, forced labor, floggings and massdeportations. An estimated number of 80,400 laborer rebels arereported to have been deported back from Brazil to Africa, settling in
the West African nations, such as Nigeria, Togo, Benin and Ghana. A
ship carrying about 70 Afro-Brazilians from 7 families arrived on the
shores of Accraʼs old port, Jamestown in 1836. Today the descendantsof these deportees are known in Ghana as the Tabom people. On
arrival to the Gold Coast, or how people used to call Ghana back then,these Afro-Brazilians lacked knowledge in local language, and would
answer to everything by saying “tabom”. “Tabom” is the Portuguese
word for “alright” and today we still use this. Whenever you donʼt
properly understand the situation or you donʼt really know how todeal with the situation, you can simply say “tabom”.
The rebellion is said to have been the turning point of the slaveryin Brazil, the last country to abolish slavery in the whole Americas. So
when we go to West Africa, in a way we try to trace these resettlementsthat exist there. We walked around the streets, and whenever we founda street name with a Portuguese name or a spot with a Portuguese
word, we assumed that it was because that place was founded by orthat name was named after those people.
These Study Days were framed around a series of exploratory
mapping exercises focused on historical memory and in a continuous
loop, not only referring to the past, but also in the possible futures.

We investigated migratory black cultures from Ghana to Brazil, andfrom Brazil to Ghana, through food, music, sounds, and objects ofworship with the hope that this allows possibilities to seek reparation
for the past in defective dynamics of cultural memory.
So here we can see “TABOM”.[2] This place is called Brazil
House. Itʼs right in Jamestown, in Accra, the place where these people
first arrived. It has been here from the time they arrived and, in 2012,
the building was refurnished.
So I was bringing this background, or these things that happeneda few months ago, also to talk about some of my curatorial practiceand my dream. When Iʼm working, or when Iʼm trying to organize
my curatorial practice, Iʼm trying to develop some of my dream whichis to struggle against the colonial ghosts. In order to do so, or todance against them, together with a colleague of mine, we created thisplatform called “We Cannot Build What We Cannot First Imagine”.
And itʼs a visionary platform created by myself and Jota Mombaça.
With the purpose of gathering works and perspectives from racialized
artists and thinkers in Brazil and abroad on the topics of radical
imagination, outer futurism, disruptive archives, queer politics, andblack philosophy. Again, itʼs all about my dreams.
With this in mind, I joined the 10th Berlin Biennale curatorial
team. We are opening in June next year. Iʼm not alone, we are a team,with Gabi Ngcobo, Nomaduma Masilela, Yvette Mutumba andMoses Serubiri.
So, together we are trying to imagining, shaping, giving forms to
our collective dreams. In conversation with artists and contributors,
who think and act beyond the arts, our curatorial process will confront
the incessant anxieties perpetuated through the misunderstanding ofcomplex subjectivities. And we will try to face the current widespreadstate of collective psychosis. Our curatorial process will be selective,
non-comprehensive, and will not provide a coherent reading of
histories or the present of any kind. The curatorial teamʼs key starting
point will be strategies of self-preservation as acts of dismantling
dominant structures in building a non-hierarchical position. And we
propose a plan for how to face our collective madness. Last July, we
released our first edition of our public program, that is called “Iʼm not
who you think Iʼm not” and we are trying to disavow assumed beingsand know-hows which tend to be based on existing constructedsocial frameworks in the associated speculations about particular

Osaka Eriko (General Director, Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale /Director, Yokohama Museum of Art)

Panel Discussion “ CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD? The Future of Biennales and Triennales”

69subjectivities.
I think somehow the image with a quote from Fela Kuti songs“Teacher Donʼt Teach Me Nonsense,” tells a lot what we are trying
to bring, what weʼre trying to discuss. Thank you very much.
Osaka｜Thank you very much. Counting from its inception in
1951, São Paolo Biennal celebrated its 32nd edition in 2016.
Meanwhile, I assume the environment surrounding the biennials haschanged a lot. I think you talked about the biennial, rather than thespecific artwork; you shared how through the international exhibition
you will be involved, how you will connect your past and future,
how you will build multiple perspectives and a non-hierarchicalenvironment, and how you will, from a specific angle, revisit various
challenges and suﬀering that people face. Let me add a few points
before asking Bige Örer to make her presentation.
In the 21st century, numerous international exhibitions or art
festivals of contemporary art called biennials or triennials were born inJapan and worldwide. Obviously, the background, the objective or the
scale of each festival are diverse and diﬀerent. However, what are thecommon perspectives across such diﬀerent international exhibitions/art festivals that make them what they are? Opening up possibilities
is something that I want to discuss in todayʼs session.
Now, the Istanbul Biennial is also an international exhibition
with long history which celebrates its 30th anniversary.
Bige Örer

(Director, Istanbul Biennale / IBA Vice-Presidents)

Istanbul Biennial
Bige Örer [Örer]｜Minasama Yokoso. Sorry I cannot continue inJapanese, I wish I could. I love your language and itʼs a great pleasure
being here and I would like to thank the organizers for the generous
hospitality and organizing this wonderful meeting on such anoccasion. Itʼs truly a great honor and pleasure to be here with you
today. And thank you very much, Thiago. Your presentation wasvery inspiring. I donʼt know how to continue after your beautiful
talk.
Before I start my introduction to the Istanbul Biennial, whichsome of you may know about, or maybe planning to visit, I would
like to share with you some questions that I had in mind, working
with the biennial for 15 years, but these questions are getting more
and more urgent for me, particularly in the last couple of years,
Being the witness of the rising sentiments of the populist
nationalism all around the world, at times when social traumas andpolitical earthquakes have increased anxieties about the future in an
unprecedented way, and individual freedoms have been cornered invarious parts of the world, “How do art institutions deal with thesituation?” “Can we think about reevaluating and to reexamining
the roles of biennials?” “As art institutions, how we respond to therising xenophobia and populism in the world?” “What can be ourstrategies or our tactics that we can develop together?” And “Whatare some lessons to learn from each otherʼs experiences? So as to not
feel isolated?” Referring to the concept of the current Yokohama
Triennale, “How do we create this connectivity in our world?”
Sometimes I feel very isolated in my environment, but when I talkwith colleagues and peers from all around the world, I can believe in
the art community and international art community, that we can still
think of a better future for all of us.
So in the last couple of years, we have been following terrorist
attacks that took places in cities including Brussels, London, Orlando,
New York, Barcelona and many others and incidents took that deeply
shook Turkey as well, around the same time, followed by the failed
coup attempt of 15th of July, which had a direct impact on the artsand culture world in Turkey. Many events had to be postponed,or cancelled. It was 3-4 months after the incident that we started
working with the curators of this edition, Elmgreen & Dragset, andI remember inviting them just after 2 weeks after the coup attempt,
talking to many opinion leaders in the society, journalists, politicalscientists, representatives of political parties, and, of course, artists,
just to get a better understanding of the context that we were to deal
with. The common voice was that the art and culture would play aneven more significant role in this context. So we carried on preparing
for this biennial once with the hope that producing and thinking
about art and discussing art can create zones in which we can breathe
and also to see where connectivity really happens.
Now I would also like to give you a brief introduction on Istanbul
Biennial which was established in 1987 by the Istanbul Foundation
for Culture and Arts, which is a non-profit and non-governmentalorganization. In the meanwhile, Iʼll be showing you some imagesof the artworks, which were produced for the Istanbul Biennial indiﬀerent spaces at diﬀerent editions, some historical places, alternative

3

Ugo Rondinone, Where Do We Go From Here?, 1999, 6th
Istanbul Biennial-2017, 15th Istanbul Biennial

spaces, and outdoors, so that you can also enjoy traveling throughtime with these amazing works. I always like to be inspired by the
artworks that we have produced and I think it gives us the will tocontinue.
Since its inception 30 years ago, the Istanbul Biennial has been
the driving force of contemporary art and culture in the city and also
in the region. Its eﬀorts have been instrumental to the growth of new
artistic and cultural platforms in Turkey and Middle East and haveprovided a unique space for international collaborations. Throughthe 15 preceding biennials a variety of diﬀerent artists brought fromTurkey and international have had the opportunity to develop new
artworks, test ideas and experiment social and aesthetic possibilities
in relation to the vision of each successive curator or curatorial team.
So the Istanbul Biennial seeks to transform the event into a
perpetual zone of education, production and criticism by bringing
the actors of the art world together in various ways.
Istanbul Biennial plays an important role not only in opening upof new forums for debating contemporary art but also in providing
alternative cultural infrastructures. It offers opportunities forrediscovering the cityʼs historical venues, as well as non-conventional
and alternative exhibition spaces, promoting art. So, during the first
couple of biennials, the venues mainly focused on the historical sites,
because as the Istanbul Biennial doesnʼt have a permanent location.
We work in diﬀerent locations and it gives us the opportunity to look
for spaces depending on the conceptual framework of the exhibition.
So here you see the works from the really previous biennials from the1987 and 89. And on the 30th anniversary of the Istanbul Biennial wewere able to host a work of Ugo Rondinone, one of his neon sculpturesfrom his ʻrainbow poemʼ series: Where Do We Go From Here? [3] In fact,
this work was first exhibited for the 6th Istanbul Biennial in 1999. We
were really happy to bring this work back in Istanbul in 2017. And tomeet also thousands of people passing the bridge from Europe to Asia,and hopefully inviting them to think about the present and the future.
And starting from this edition, we are very happy to leave the city apermanent work.
We would like to commission work for each edition in the next
5 editions and they will be permanently located in public space. And
the fact that this work was installed in 1999, in Taksim Square which
is a very contested space, it also empowers the meaning around thework.
We have opened the 15th Istanbul Biennial just 10 days ago.
We had a really great opening and I really felt like the whole city

4

Hosting neighborhood associations

was celebrating the biennial. And there are also so many events,neighboring events which are happening at the same time with thebiennial. More than hundred events, not only organized by cultural
institutions and museums, but also independent initiatives, andartist-run spaces.
The title of the biennial is “a good neighbor,” and for the firsttime in our history, itʼs curated by an artist duo: Elmgreen & Dragset.
This edition explores how our perception of “home” has changed overthe past decades, how we protect, shelter and express our identities
within our domestic settings but also how these private spheres––our homes function next to each other. How do we become goodneighbors? Are we good neighbors? Do we accept the diﬀerences
we might have in relation to the people next to us? These were thequestions raised during our process of working on this biennial. The
biennial will continue until November 12th, so I would like to invite
you all to join us in Istanbul and visit the exhibition.
Now I would also like to talk a bit about what we are trying
to do in terms of dealing with the situation, also having witnessed
the aftermath of the Brexit referendum and Trump being elected
as the US president. How can we connect with our peers locallyand internationally even more, to create a zone of resistance? As webelieved in the importance of the grassroots artists-run organizations,
we made collaborations with them. To give you an example, we werein Diyarbakir, which is located in the eastern part of Turkey, with ahighly Kurdish population. We were there just one week before theopening of the biennial to do a talk at the artist-run space “Loading”.
There were more than hundred people ‒ young students, artists,
art professionals ‒ so it was really great to feel strong together.
We also initiated a public program, coordinated by an artist andacademician from Istanbul, Zeyno Pekünlü, that encompasses
various events and discussions around the concept of family andneighborhood. In addition to the opening and closing symposiums,
there are periodic events in which the audience has the opportunity
to participate in discussions, debates and workshops entitled “chosenfamilies” and “mutual fate”. There are also cooking sessions, jamsessions and meetings where neighborhood associations gather inorder to discuss their strategies against the urban transformation,
gentrification and other issues. It was really great to host theneighborhood associations, as they were also redefining the notion of“neighbor” and “neighborhood”.[4] We also believe in the importanceof the international collaborations, so we established an exchange
program of biennial staﬀ, starting last year with Liverpool Biennial.

Panel Discussion “ CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD? The Future of Biennales and Triennales”

71

BEPPU PROJECT
Yamaide Junʼya [Yamaide]｜My name is Yamaide. I would like to

5International Billboard Project

So, one of the exhibition coordinators of the Istanbul Biennial,Özkan Cangüven was in Liverpool to help with the production andinstallation of the exhibition for 3 months, and the education curator
Polly Brannan from Liverpool Biennial is at the moment in Istanbul
to work with our education teams.
We have also initiated an international billboard project, toshare the team of the good neighbor in diﬀerent cities around theworld. Through collaborations with cultural institutions all aroundthe world, many of them being the biennials or triennials, theinternational billboard project designed by Rupert Smyth, who wasalso the designer of the whole visual identity of the biennial, displays
a selection of photographs by artist Lukas Wassmann, which capture
unexpected encounters paired with questions asking “what makes agood neighbor?”[5] Host cities include, Ljubljana, Moscow, Sydney,
Milan, Singapore, Seoul, Guangzhou, Liverpool, Manchester,
Chicago and many others. And the project will continue until the endof 2017. I would like to thank all of my colleagues who made thesecollaborations possible. Some of them are here with us together. AndIʼm sure we will grow them together more in the future.
So finally, regarding the questions I raised in the beginning ―Iʼm sure we will continue asking these questions again and again,
and we will try to find answers on the way ― but my answer so far
is to work harder, even harder, and listen, listen and listen. Create
a new language together and create our own language, which is
diﬀerent than the language of the governments and mass media. Act
collectively. And build up and develop more local and international
collaborations, to avoid the feeling of isolation and to feel strong
together. Thank you.

talk about BEPPU PROJECT, which is the name of NPO that I havefounded and represent. It is a great pleasure to be able to talk to you
today and I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to people from
IBA and all other people involved. While I was listening to the twopresentations, I became to think if my presentation was appropriate
here because our approach is quite diﬀerent from them. Anyway, it
would be great if you can listen to me.
Since not all of you have visited Beppu, let me briefly talk about
the city of Beppu. As many Japanese know, Beppu is a famous hotspring city. Like this you see steam rising everywhere.[6] There are
2,217 hot spring vents within the city, accounting for 10% of the hotspring vents in Japan. Hot springs and wells in Oita discharge morethan 80,000 liters of thermal water every minute, which is more than
1 liter of hot water supplied to everyone in Japan. It would be great
if it were oil... well, I donʼt know. Anyway, Oita has the one of thehighest yields of renewable energy in Japan. Furthermore, the city
escaped war damage so many old narrow streets remain from before
the war. In 2000, an international university, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific
University (APU), opened in Beppu and today the rate of foreign
resident is one of the highest in Japan. We started our project in 2005
and rolled out various projects since then. Last year, we counted how
many projects we carried out to date with my staﬀ and there weremore than a thousand, which scared me. I felt sorry for my staﬀ forkeeping them very busy. We are a non-profit organization that places
art at its core and work as a creative engine that produces diverse values
in society, with a focus on the city of Beppu and the prefectural areaof Oita.
This is the overview of our activities. Our main focus has beenplanning and implementation of art projects. We run projects ofvarious scale, from big projects to small workshops. Our recent
project involves sending artists to schools. Through such activities,
we bring many artists to Beppu; some have enjoyed their stay andwe have seen them actually move to Beppu. A local newspaper once
did a survey and reported that more than 120 people engaged in art,
design and creative activities have moved to the city since 2009. We
also do outreach projects for social welfare institutions, in which we

Osaka｜Thank you, for the presentation which also related to theconcept of Yokohama Triennale, “isolation” and “connectivity”
from the Istanbulʼs point of view. You highlighted the importanceof collaboration, whether it is international, local or regional. Now,
we would like to ask Mr. Yamaide to share a very unique activity
called BEPPU PROJECT in Japan. He will share how he practices
developing art locally not only through international exhibitions but
also through various approaches.

672

Beppu City

Panel Discussion “ CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD? The Future of Biennales and Triennales”

Yamaide Junʼya (Executive Director of NPO BEPPU PROJECT / Artist)

work with Oita Prefecture and private companies to develop various
activities. There is a facility called the House of Sun in Beppu. The
person who proposed the idea of Paralympics in Japan was fromBeppu; in fact, Beppu is where the Paralympics were born. Partly
due to such reason, many disabled people, more than 3,000, whichis almost the same number as exchange students, live and workin Beppu. We also send out local information of Beppu. The city
is known as a sightseeing town, so we introduce information on
restaurants and entertainment. Since I dine out every night to forresearch, I gained more than 25 kilograms since I started BEPPU
PROJECT. Anyway, we share that kind of information.
Through such activities and projects, I have been involved ina range of projects in Oita Prefecture, not only based in cultural
institutions and art centers, but also in the hilly and mountainous
areas. When I started working in those areas, I turned to the local

7

Anthony Gormley, ANOTHER TIME XX Photo: KUBO Takashi / ©Beppu
Contemporary Art Festival “Mixed Bathing World” Executive Committee

people engaged in forestry or agriculture because they have the mostknowledge about the location. As I talked to them, I found out that,in order to release this clean water as a product, we have to protect
the mountain. I had several rounds of such conversations with them,and started to think that we could protect this beautiful landscape by
supporting these people. Thatʼs how we came up with “Oita Made”,
launching three brands in Oita. We established a company withthe local Oita Bank to promote these brands; we hope to develop
this company into a trading company that trade local goods. Suchinitiatives have led to collaborations with various companies.
What I want to say is that we do not confine ourselves to working
within the framework of art or culture; rather, we try to come up
with how to make this region or society better through our practiceof engaging with artists or creative people. Having said this, since weare talking about international exhibitions today, let me share withyou some of such projects in which we have been involved.
This is Kunisaki Art Festival in 2014, organized by Oita
Prefecture, Kunisaki City, Bungotakada City and Oita City Tourist
Association. Do you know Kunisaki Peninsula? It is a round-shaped
peninsula located in the north of Oita Prefecture and said to be theplace where Shinto syncretism was born. The area has continued
with this tradition over 1,300 years; very distinct religious views andprayers remain. I worked as the director of this project. We installed
artworks in exceptionally unique locations. For example, the artwork
by Antony Gormley was placed on the rocks very close to the summitof the mountain.[7] If you park a car at the foot of the mountain andwalk, it takes about 80 minutes to reach these rocks. Since itʼs a rocky
area we prepared shoes and rented them to the visitors. The oﬃcers ofKunisaki City government said it was probably an artwork mounted
in the most dangerous place in Japan. The sculpture is made from iron

Panel Discussion “ CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD? The Future of Biennales and Triennales”

73without coating so it will probably eventually get rusty, turning into
sand and then return to the mountain. We are presenting this wholeprocess as an artwork. This area was the base for Buddhist training,
so we initially experienced a huge resistance against installing the art,
which eventually turned into a social problem that was reported by
the newspapers every day. But the people from prefectural oﬃces andothers concerned patiently negotiated with the local residents which
resulted in the final installation. The work remains as a permanent
installation today, but I hear that an oﬀertory box is now placed in
front of the sculpture. It was interesting to know that coins from many
diﬀerent countries have been thrown into the box.
Miyajima Tatsuoʼs work is 40-meters-wide digital counters on ahuge rock. Similar to the project in Naoshima, this was produced incollaboration with the local residents.
The work by Kawamata Tadashi refers to a missionary called
Father Petro Kasui Kabe who was born in this area. He was the firstJapanese priest to visit the Vatican, during the time when Christianity
was banned in Japan. There is a record that he walked through the
Asian continent and deserts. He started his journey at the foot of thismountain. To honor and walk with his journey, Kawamata made an
artwork similar to a pathway.
These artworks remain, so although, they donʼt have hundredsof people come see the work every day, the residents show hospitality
to the visitors who come all the way. Actually, the locals built anoven near Miyajimaʼs work to bake pizzas to serve the visitors. Manydiﬀerent exchanges are taking place in this location.
This is one of the main projects of NPO BEPPU PROJECT,
called “Mixed Bathing World”. We initially planned to do this only
for three editions, in 2009, 2012 and 2015, like a triennial. We spent
about ten years, including the years for preparation, on this project.
We initially thought that if we could continue with the project forthat span of time, the local conditions can change. We wanted to findout what kind of project would be necessary in such a context.
In 2009 and 2012, we installed many artworks in the diﬀerent
parts of the city and the visitors toured the area with a map, which
is a very standard approach. But in 2015, in our last edition, we
completely changed the scheme. The visitors could see the artworks
only if they joined the pre-arranged tour.[8] We ran two tours a day, inwhich only 15 could join one tour. So access to the artworks was very
limited, and the tour could be sold out and this made some people
angry. This tour was arranged so that a small group of people would

be given keys to spaces that are usually not accessible.
For example, Kuwakubo Ryotaʼs work was installed in theunderground district of Beppu, which had been closed for 50 years.
We also had a former porn cinema, where the tour guide would open
the key to the now abandoned space where Eda Shioriʼs work wasplaced on the stage. Public hall would be the next stop.
In the many hot springs in Beppu, the second floor of the bathingfacilities are used as public halls. This means that the hot springs areat the heart of the community. Otomo Yoshihide installed his workin one of those public halls. He gathered all the old electric appliancesthat were made more than 30 years ago and no longer in use, andplaced them in the hall. Led by the guide, the visitors come to see thework. There is a staﬀ who opens the curtain and presses the switches
according to the score written by Otomo. The score shows whichswitch should be pressed when. Once the staﬀ hits the switch, theelectric appliances start to move. At first, you regard it as mere noise,
but gradually it forms a rhythm and finally turns into a melody of La
vie en rose by Louis Armstrong. It is like experiencing a concert of 15
minutes.
We are no longer interested in pursuing quantity; we areinterested in working on projects that are, however small in scale, richand profound in the artistic experience and rooted in the community.
Thatʼs what we learned from the 2015 edition of “Mixed BathingBath”.
So the “Mixed Bathing Bath” series finished in 2015. We
launched a succeeding project called “in BEPPU” last year. In thisproject, we place the names of artist in front of “in BEPPU”. When
we did the “Mixed Bathing Bath,” we used an average budget of
approximately 100 million yen per edition. I would call this a midsized project. Around 60 artists joined the project, so the budget
for honorarium and production per artist was not so abundant, but
we were able to succeed with the support of many people. For “in
BEPPU,” we decided to select a single artist per edition using thesame budget. Hence we switched from organizing a group exhibition
to a solo exhibition. Of course, this was a new attempt for us, but the
government oﬃcers and those involved in the project committee were
all in support. The city mayor, in particular, backed us up by sayingthat Beppu has to do something really edgy.
We decided to host the first project in the municipal hall. We
invited the artist group Me who created a large space filled with mist,
where a luminescent material floated in the air.[9] You really could

8

9

74

Visitors on tour in Beppu

Photo: KUBO Takashi / ©Beppu
Contemporary Art Festival “Mixed Bathing World” Executive Committee

Me in BEPPU Photo: KUBO Takashi / ©Beppu Contemporary Art
Festival “Mixed Bathing World” Executive Committee

Panel Discussion “ CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD? The Future of Biennales and Triennales”

not tell from where the art begins and where it ends. It was a project
where you felt like you were traveling through a theatrical space. This
project continued for a month. The windows of the town oﬃce fromthe basement floor to the third floor had to stay closed during that
period. It must have caused a lot of inconvenience to the oﬃcers andI am grateful for their kind understanding. This year we will organize“Tatzu Nishi in BEPPU”. We hope to turn various locations in Beppu
into his art space.
Since we switched to organizing solo shows instead of groupshows, the number of artists directly involved in our projects
decreased. So we decided to simultaneously hold the “Beppu Art
Month,” a community cultural festival open to all citizens involved
in artistic activities, so that we continue to provide broad access to art
to all kinds of people.
We have been expanding beyond Beppu and working acrossOita prefecture. As one of the summation of our eﬀorts, we aregoing to work on the National Cultural Festival in collaboration
with the 18 cities, towns and villages across the prefecture. There will
be contemporary art, but also traditional Shinto music and dance,
festival, food-related events and programs for local experiences. We
hope to see you next autumn in Oita.Thank you.

Learning / Education in Biennials/Triennials/
Festivals in Different Contexts
Osaka｜Thank you very much. After listening to the presentations, I

suppose many of you now recognize how diverse biennials, triennials
and festivals could be depending on the diﬀerent contexts andhistory. Iʼd like to ask some questions on the points that I foundcommon among all of you. Even though the political background,
historical background or cultural background are diﬀerent, everyone
touched on their eﬀorts to open opportunities for young people,
that is, inspiring people and changing the environment of the local
community. Perhaps this is all about education. I would like to know
your thoughts on the educational aspects of biennials and festivals,
and what impact it has on the public, or how it is disseminated to the
public and what impact it has on the younger generations.
de Paula Souza｜I donʼt know the right word in English, orin Japanese, but the word I am thinking of is something like“enlightenment,” or perhaps, “learning.” Yes, “learning andunlearning” sounds better. Well, my background is an educator, butIʼd like to say Iʼm an educator for a curatorial practice. There may
be a cultural and generational gap in a way, but right now, what Iʼmtrying to produce is not only for the younger generation, but itʼs forall of us. In other words, Iʼm trying to create possibilities for dialogues,
conversation with all of us. I think that the older approaches arestill here and they need to stop repeating or reproducing certain
problematic ideas or problematic concepts that get stuck, or thatkeeps us in this space. When I think about my process, when I
think about how to display work, when I think about how to shareknowledge, Iʼm thinking about talking to all of us, not only to theyoungsters. I think my goal is to create new possibilities and new
language to talk about certain objects or certain themes.

Örer｜Yes, I think, I really see the biennial platform itself as an

educational, learning program. Maybe because of the structure of
the Istanbul Biennial when it was established, there was not even acontemporary art museum in the city, and the cultural infrastructure
was not developed. So for many people and art students, to experience
the real artworks coming from all around the world for the first time
was to see the Istanbul Biennial. So imagine late 1980s or the early90s, when it was not so easy to travel. I think it started creating thisspace for experiencing real artworks and having a dialogue with artists,talking about their works. And then of course, what do you do asa biennial to reach the audience, to reach your public? Or what doyou do in order to have a real engagement? How do you engage yourpeople, your public? I also donʼt like to diﬀerentiate exhibition fromthe public programs, or from the educational programs, because thebiennial structures or teams are so small that everybody needs to beengaged with diﬀerent roles and responsibilities. So as an exhibition
coordinator you also need to think, or as a director, or even, I mean,
a project coordinator you also need to think how this thing we create
together reaches the public. But maybe I will give you a couple ofconcrete examples, if youʼd like to emphasize.
In 2013, after the Giza resistance, we were planning to haveworks outdoors. Then we decided to use 5 exhibition spaces, instead,so we re-shifted the whole exhibition. We decided to make thebiennial free of charge because we really wanted the biennial to bea public space, without any restrictions. So I think that decision
was very important also to be able to reach diﬀerent groups, andmore people in the society. Maybe also because of the fact that art
education in Turkey is very conservative, and there are not so manyart academies where you can really get to know what is happening in
the current contemporary art world, we have been trying to develop
some programs like curatorial programs or residency programs forartists, or portfolio reviews for younger artists, etc.
de Paula Souza｜I think I didnʼt make myself clear when I was
talking about the “enlightenment”. From my perspective, when we
think about art, I donʼt like the idea that art will somehow teachsomething to someone. Itʼs a very elitist perspective in my opinion.
I like the idea that maybe, people can or cannot create some relation
with certain objects, with certain works, but I definitely donʼt like theidea that art is in some kind of layer that all of us should access thatspace or that work in order to learn something. I think itʼs important
to break this reading. It doesnʼt work for me, at least.
One of the reasons Iʼm moving to Berlin is somehow to getconnected and get closer to the local community. I was talking with
Gabriel Horn, director of Berlin Biennale, and she said that maybe
Berlin Biennale is more popular in Manhattan than in the local
context. Iʼm really interested in creating bridges with those who arearound us. Maybe because I really have this thing with the São Paulo
Biennial, which is free of charge and everybody goes because itʼs in
the park. So I think the public program in a way will help us to reachand to open a dialogue with people who are not from the art world.
Osaka｜Mr. Yamaide knows how to connect with local communities
because he has been involved in many of them. I want to ask what hePanel Discussion “ CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD? The Future of Biennales and Triennales”

75values including that context of art.
Yamaide｜So, on education. I am now managing a NPO, but I neverwent to school to learn about business management. I started mycareer as an artist, but I never went to an art university to study art.
But in both cases, I started because I had a desire to learn things that
I needed to know.
My activities are rooted in the local community. So, even if
art could bring an extraordinary element to the everyday, I am very
conscious to avoid disconnecting from the everyday lives of the local
community. In order to make sure we are connected, I would liketo create as many touch points for dialog and exchange between
the artists and the local residents as possible. Having said that, wehavenʼt even achieved this yet, and we are struggling with our trials
and errors. But as long as we keep ourselves open, we can connect toour community. The community members would find their way of
welcoming the artists and make an eﬀort in planning routes for thevisitors to enjoy art. It is important that they create something thatis beyond our control. That is essential. So as much as we need to be
professional, we need to also be good collaborators of the community
to share the vision of a daily life that is beyond our imagination. We
need to continue having this desire for collaboration.

What if Biennials/Triennials/Festivals did not Existin our World?
Osaka｜What do you think our life would be without the biennials,

triennials and art festivals? I know it is a big question but could I ask
you to comment?

Japan. I remember in 1999, I was at the press conference for the first
Yokohama Triennale at the Arsenale during the Venice Biennale andI was very happy sitting there. I still remember the great excitement
thinking, “Wow, biennials and triennials will now be held in Japan.”Thanks to the eﬀorts of the people involved, now the event has spread
across Japan.
However, somehow the intentions or the objectives of holding
such events gets absorbed in economy, or populism, as someone
mentioned before, which tend to be stronger in their intentions. Itʼs
not about whether we should have biennials or not, but rather about
the attitude and the will you have in presenting an international
project like biennials. It is important to have a strong will in supportof diverse values. The world is essentially consists of a range of diﬀerent
values in co-existence. It is extremely rare to discuss such things in ourcontemporary society today, but I believe, for us, biennials/triennials
are meaningful and art has its reasons to exist because they support
these ideas.
Osaka｜Thank you very much, everyone. We face the world where
extremely complex isolation and division pervades, but through art
and through this kind of biennials and triennials, I believe we connect
with each other to form solidarity and to join in force. I deeply thankyou for your attention. Please give a big hand to The three panelists.
Thank you.
MC ｜ Thank you very much. This concludes the internationalseminar, “CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD? The Future of
Biennales and Triennales.”de Paula Souza｜My first contact with contemporary art was in abiennial, so in a way, I still believe in the power and potency of these
institutions. I cannot properly say how the world would be like, but I
would definitely believe that this platform should be as experimental
as possible. Not probably creating a counter-institution, or a museum,but somehow it must be a place for knowledge production, especiallycounter-knowledge production.
Örer｜I think we wouldnʼt have be here to meet each other, no? We

wouldnʼt be here in Japan, talking about the art, the world, the present
and the future, so thanks again to the existence of biennials. I thinkitʼs an ecology, you know, where art institutions, museums, biennials,
galleries, non-profit spaces... we co-act together. And without theexistence of one party, maybe we wouldnʼt be able to have thisdiversity of voices in the art scene. And I always believe that biennial
format is a very flexible format, so you can really put your energy, yourknowledge into it and create something new out of it for each andevery edition. So the fact that biennials bring people together, create aspace for producing new artworks, creating a space to unfold, maybe
discussions and debates in the societies when it seems diﬃcult to talkabout things or also to give another perspective to the controversial
issues. I think we need the biennials all around the world.
Yamaide｜Well, Iʼm Japanese so Iʼd like to talk about the situation in76

Panel Discussion “ CONNECTIVITY AS A METHOD? The Future of Biennales and Triennales”

Panelist Profiles[Keynote Speaker]
Soichiro FUKUTAKE
Honorary Adviser, Benesse Holdings, Inc.; President, Benesse
Art Site Naoshima; Chairman of the Board, Fukutake Foundation;
General Producer, Setouchi Triennale. / Japan
An Okayama native, Fukutake graduated from the Faculty of
Science and Engineering, Waseda University. He joined Fukutake
Publishing (now Benesse Holdings, Inc.) in 1973, and was appointed
Representative Director in 1986, then Chairman and CEO in
2007. He became the Executive Adviser to the company in 2014and has served as Honorary Adviser since October 2016. He
has spearheaded the Inland Sea renaissance around Naoshima,
Teshima and Inujima focused on art, nature and architecture for the
past 30 years through Benesse Art Site Naoshima projects. In 2004,
he established the Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation(now Fukutake Foundation), and opened the Chichu Art Museum on
Naoshima and was named honorary citizen of Naoshima. He is
distinguished with many awards, including the Minister of Education
Award for Fine Arts (2008), AIJ Appreciation Prize (2010), andMontblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award (2012).
[Panelist]
Thiago de PAULA SOUZA
Member of 10th Berlin Biennale curatorial team / Curator / Educator/ Brazil
Thiago de Paula Souza is a member of the 10th Berlin
Biennale curatorial team. He lives and works in São Paulo, BR,
where he worked as an educator at Museu Afro Brasil between
2014 and 2016. In 2016 he co-curated the exhibition “Living On– In Other Words on Living?” at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna,
Austria. At the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, de Paula Souza joined
the Accra Study Days team, organized by Gabi Ngcobo as part ofthe public program, and was also part of the Bienalʼs Oficina deImaginação Política (“political imagination workshop”). He collaborated
with lanchonete.org, an artist-led cultural platform focused on daily
life and progressive actions in contemporary cities with São Paulo
as a reference point, and co-created “We Cannot Build What We
Cannot First Imagine (WCB WCFI)”, a visionary platform that gathers
works and perspectives from racialized artists and thinkers. De
Paula Souza currently researches on the depiction of art from SouthAmerica and the African diaspora in the German-speaking context.
This research will soon extend to non-Western circumstanceswhere he will investigate how the art communities engage in thedeconstruction of hegemonic readings of histories.

YAMAIDE Junʼya
Executive Director of NPO BEPPU PROJECT / Artist / Japan
Born in 1970 in Oita, Japan. Yamaide participated in theInternational Studio Program at PS1 in New York (2000-2001), thentook residency in Paris as an external scholar of the Agency for
Cultural Affairs (2002-2004). As an artist, he has participated in many
exhibitions including Taipei Biennial in Taiwan (2000-2001), among
others. He founded BEPPU PROJECT in 2005 with an aim to holdinternational exhibitions in cooperation with different organizations.
He was the general producer of “Mixed Bathing World” (2009,2012, 2015) and general director of “Kunisaki Art Festival” (2014),
general director of “Oita Toilennale” (2015), and general producerof “in BEPPU” (2016). He is advisor to the Kokumin Bunkasai 2018
(since 2016). He received the “New Face” Award from the Ministry of
Education (Art Promotion section) (2008).

[Moderator]
OSAKA Eriko
General Director, Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale /Director, Yokohama Museum of Art / Japan
Osaka has previously worked at the Japan Foundation, ICA
Nagoya, and served as senior curator (1994-96) and artistic director(1997-2006) at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito,
artistic director at Mori Art Museum (2007-January 2009), before
assuming her current position as director of Yokohama Museumof Art in April 2009. She has curated numerous contemporary art
exhibitions including the Japan pavilion for the 49th Venice Biennale
as commissioner and “Cai Guo-Qiang: There and Back Again”(2015). She was Director General for Yokohama Triennale 2011 andChairman of the Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale
2014. She is also board member of the International Biennial
Association.

Bige ÖRER
Director, Istanbul Biennial / Turkey
Born in Istanbul in 1977, Örer came aboard on the Istanbul
Foundation for Culture and Arts in 2003 and worked in thecoordination of cultural and artistic projects until she was appointed
director to the Istanbul Biennial in 2008. Since 2009, she has
been the advisor of the Pavilion of Turkey at the International Art
Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia. She has acted as a consultant
and a jury member for a number of international cultural and artistic
projects and as an independent expert in the European Unionʼsdepartment that evaluates cultural funds. Bige Örerʼs breadth ofactivity embraces both the artistic and the academic fields. She
has also been teaching, between 2011 and 2013, courses on
the subject of managing biennials and international exhibitions at
the Istanbul Bilgi University. Since March 2013, she is the vicepresident of the International Biennial Association.
Panelist Profiles

77

DISCUSSIONS“ Where are we now? What are our strategies?
How are we to implement them? ”78Panelist Profiles

79

List of Participants
Discussion 1 “Why Biennales and Triennales? New challenges, models and strategies”

No. of Participants: 17
Presentations (in order of presentation)
Atteqa MALIK (Vice Chairperson, Karachi Biennale Trust / Pakistan)
Margarita GONZALEZ (Artistic Director, 12th Havana Biennial / Vice Director, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam / Cuba)
T. Melih GÖRGÜN (Founder and Artistic Director, Sinopale / Turkey)
L. Igo DIARRA (Director, La Médina / Mali)
Participants (in alphabetical order of family name)
Hoor AL QASMI (President and Director, Sharjah Art Foundation / UAE)
Lewis BIGGS (Curator, Folkstone Triennial / UK)
Sylvie FORTIN (Independent Curator / former Executive and Artistic Director, La Biennale de Montréal / Canada)
Dolly KOLA=BALOGUN (Co-Founder, Retro African / Nigeria)
Gabriele HORN (Director, Berlin Biennale / Germany)
Isabella HUGHES (Director, Honolulu Biennial Foundation / USA)
Md. Jafar IQBAL (CEO, Shunno Art Space / Bangladesh )LING Min (Vice President, AICA / Board Member, IAAC / China)
Elke AUS DEM MOORE (Head of the Visual Arts Department, ifa / Germany)
OSAKA Eriko (General Director, Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale / Director, Yokohama Museum of Art / Japan)
Facilitator
IIDA Shihoko (Associate Professor, Tokyo University of the Arts / Curator / Japan)
No. of Observers: 2

Discussion 2 “How do we develop professional skills in biennales and triennales?”No. of Participants: 14
Presentations (in order of presentation)
Bige ÖRER (Director, Istanbul Biennial / Turkey)
Riyas KOMU (Co-Founder, Kochi Biennale Foundation/ Artist / Curator / India)
Thiago de PAULA SOUZA (Member of 10th Berlin Biennale curatorial team / Curator / Educator / Brazil)
Participants (in alphabetical order of family name)
Nevenka ŠIVAVEC (Director, Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts / Director, International Center of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana / Slovenia)
Sally TALLANT (Director, Liverpool Biennial / UK)
Christian OXENIUS (University of Liverpool / UK)
Fabio CAVALLUCCI (Director, Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art / Italy)
Judith GREER (Director of International Programmes, Sharjah Art Foundation / UAE)
Facilitator
HOASHI Aki (Project Manager, Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale / Japan)
No. of Observers: 5

80

List of Participants

DISCUSSIONS“ Where are we now? What are our strategies?
How are we to implement them? ”
Introduction
Hoashi Aki [Hoashi] ｜ Good morning. Iʼm Aki Hoashi, project
manager of Yokohama Triennale. Myself and Iida Shihoko will befacilitating the two discussions that will take place this morning, one
entitled “Why Biennales and Triennales? New challenges, models andstrategies,” and the second entitled “How do we develop professional
skills in biennales and triennales?” The reason I proposed to havediscussions on these two topics is that I really wanted to know where
we are now with biennials and triennials, what are our strategies, andhow are we implementing them. All the members associated with
the IBA are those who actually manage the organizations that run
the biennials. So I thought this would be a nice opportunity for us toshare knowledge and experiences.
I am going to first share with you the main discussion topics,
then Shihoko will give a brief presentation on the background ofwhere Japan is today, so that you understand why we are concernedwith some of the topics we are bringing up in our discussion.
The general aim is to share current issues and new strategies for
professionals involved in the biennials/triennials and the festival

sector, and to build a shared understanding of what biennials/
triennials could be, and what we need to work on in the future to
make this sector better.
The first group of discussion will discuss, “Why Biennales andTriennales? New challenges, models and strategies.” We have asked
four members to present new and existing biennials, particularly
in Asia and African regions to understand why they are organizingbiennials and triennials at all. Why are they not building museums?
Why are they doing biennials in particular at this time in theirlocalities? Furthermore, we would like to ask the new challenges andstrategies they may be dealing with in launching and/or redefining
their biennials and triennials. This first discussion group will befacilitated by Shihoko.
The second group will discuss the topic, “How do we develop
professional skills in biennales and triennales?” What programs arenecessary and/or appropriate for developing skills and careers? For
example, after several editions of biennials you start feeling that you
really need to sustain your organization and develop the skills of yourstaﬀ members.
So through the two discussions, we will not only discuss aboutinitiating a biennial/triennial but also sustaining one.
In the first discussion group, we have asked Atteqa Malikfrom Karachi Biennale, Margarita Gonzalez from Havana Biennial,
T. Melih Görgün from International Sinop Biennial, and then L. Igo
Diarra from African Biennale of Photography in Bamako.
In the second discussion group, we will have Bige Örer from
Istanbul Biennial and Riyas Komu from Kochi-Muziris Biennale totalk about the overall organization, how they recruit their team, andwhat are the urgent issues about building teams and organizations. The
third speaker, Thiago de Paula Souza, is not a member of a biennialorganization, but has worked/working as an educator and curator forbiennials in São Paulo and Berlin. We would like to understand how
he is developing his career through the biennial experiences.
So before we split into two discussion groups, I would liketo hand the microphone to Shihoko, who will give us an overview
of what we share as issues or what are the context of the Japanesebiennials and triennials.

Biennials/Triennials/Festivals in Japan
Iida Shihoko [Iida]｜Good morning everyone. Iʼm going to briefly

talk about the context or background of biennials/triennials/festivals
in Japan. I know that many of you are familiar with the history ofbiennials around the world. I just wanted to give you an idea aboutsome major biennials and triennials in Japan that have been founded
after 2000. The exceptions are two important ones: one is Tokyo
Biennale (1952-1990) and the other one is Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale
organized by the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (1999-). So keeping
this in your mind, the map of todayʻs discussion is this. This is a mapof Japan, which shows eight major biennials/triennials/festivals thatare being held in 2017 alone. So among the eight, four are newly
established biennials/triennials/festivals in Japan.[1]For your reference, the size of Japan is almost equivalent tothe size of the United Kingdom. So, itʼs obviously diﬃcult to see allof these events in one year. If I extend this map and show the listthat is not limited to this year, the map goes like this.[2] I have justpicked up approximately 15 major biennials/triennials/festivals thatprimarily focus on contemporary art, or at least, those that include
contemporary art as one of the primary elements in organizing theevent. There are many more festival events in Japan than shown inthis map.
According to a survey (conducted in 2014 by Nomura ResearchInstitute, Ltd., commissioned by the Agency for Cultural Aﬀairs) which lists up
cultural events and art festivals in Japan that literally have “biennial”
or “festival” in their event titles, there were over 120 of such events.
This is quite an insane number, but the scale as well as the context
and history are diﬀerent from event to event. So itʼs very diﬃcult togeneralize the current situation. Interestingly, the five events that I
have underlined in my map are all directed by Kitagawa Fram.[2] In away, it looks as if thereʼs a franchise of biennials and triennials under
Kitagawa Fram brand.
Let me further try to explain the details of this map. Iʼdlike to emphasize again that each case is very diﬀerent, but there
are roughly two diﬀerent types of such events. One is “regional
82

Biennials/Triennials/Festivals in Japan

Hoashi Aki (Project Manager, Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale)development type” (shown in ●), and the other one is the so-called“urban revitalization type” (shown in ○).[3] As you might see, thoseregional developmental types are mostly held in inland areas, in thenorthern part of Japan, or in the Setouchi inland sea area. The urban
revitalization types are held in major capital cities such as Sapporo,
Yokohama, Saitama, Nagoya, and Beppu (a smaller city), cities which
are generally facing the Pacific Ocean.
So let me explain the meaning of the contextual diﬀerences
between these two types of events. First, the regional development
type is held in regions suﬀering from aging society and depopulation.
Because of this, they could potentially seek financial support from the
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, which would
enable them to construct buildings to organize events, build roads andrepair bridges to improve access. This type involves physically building
an infrastructure along with organizing their cultural events. It brings
big money, much bigger than culture-related funding.
The “urban revitalization type” is held in urban cities that aim torevitalize their cities particularly through cultural tourism. Yokohama
Triennale falls under this category. The primary aim of organizing abiennial in this category is for urban culture, and the funding could be
potentially sourced from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports,
Science and Technology (including Agency for Cultural Aﬀairs).
The people who run these events are organizers and art
professionals. In Japan, most of the biennials/triennials/festivals
shown on the maps I showed you earlier are organized by local
governments. A very small number of biennials that are initiatedby artists are also supported by the local authorities. In many cases,
the president and oﬃcers of the organization running these events
are not necessarily art professionals. They are government oﬃcers
or public servants. They outsource specific part of the project to theart professionals like us to curate the exhibition or to work on the
programs and contents.
Since the main funding is public money, the organizers are fully
responsible to the tax payers and, therefore, would like to achieve
tangible goals that translate into prosperity and stability. Their maininterest is not to change, which is the very crucial point. We, theart professionals and cultural workers, perhaps including artists,
tend to emphasize the significance of practicing contemporary art.
Because we, the art professionals, are not organizers, we can takeartistic responsibility, but canʼt take full responsibility on the legal
and financial aspects of the events. This may be quite a distinct way
in how biennials/triennials/festivals in Japan are managed.
Each party brings in diﬀerent expectations, too. From theorganizerʼs perspective, the primary goal is to rediscover the regionʼs
attractiveness or charms through art and culture and attract young
people and business, with expectations that they would eventually
move to their local cities and revitalize the region. They also expect
promoting inbound tourism through art events as well as raising
the cultural literacy of the citizens. In contrast, we, art professionals
and cultural workers, have a goal to broaden access to contemporary
art for the public through means diﬀerent from those used inconventional art museums. Furthermore, we aim to share critical aswell as international perspectives on certain issues with the citizens
and local artists, contribute to shaping art histories of both regional
and international, and present visions for the future.
The actual situation is much more complex but I just wanted togive you a summary of the contextual backgrounds that leads to thecurrent issues in Japan.
The organizers tend to put emphasis on the regional
development, economic eﬃcacy, and presenting Japanese culture toboost Japanese presence abroad. As a result, we face issues such aslack of critique and discussions on quality of works. At times, we
also face censorship and self-censorship as a consequence of excessive
control by organizers who donʼt want to have problems. There arealso challenges in professional skill and career development and issuesof exploiting freelance cultural workers. So, in many cases, sharing
the same vision and aims between these two parties (organizers and art
professionals) could be a challenge.
Now that I have given a very quick run through the contextual
background of Japanese biennials/triennials/festivals, Iʼd like to raise
three questions for our discussion in order to just stimulate ideas.
The first question is on sustainability. When the reason oforganizing a biennial starts to divert from its original aims for reasonsthat are perhaps cultural, political, and economical, how could thebiennials/triennials/festivals be sustained, justified, or organized? Orshould it be terminated? The second is on curation. Because I am acurator, Iʼm very curious about the role of curators in the context ofbiennials. Iʼve always struggled. How is curating a biennial diﬀerent
from curating museum shows? How does curation function in thecontext of biennials? This question is related to my other question,that is, whether an appointment of artistic director of non-art
profession is a unique phenomenon in Japan or not? And my last
question is, what is the most essential quality, strength and eﬃcacy
of biennials?

Iida Shihoko (Associate Professor, Tokyo University of the Arts / Curator)

1

2

○
●
●

Hoashi｜So now, we are going to split into two discussion groups to

○
○

○

○

○

○

●

○

○
●

focus on two specific topics. Weʼll be back in this room again later
to inform each other about what we have discussed in each of ourgroups.

●○3

Biennials/Triennials/Festivals in Japan83

DISCUSSION 1“ Why Biennales and Triennales?

New challenges, models andstrategies ”
Iida｜Welcome to Discussion1. In this discussion, I would like to firstinvite Atteqa Malik to speak about the Karachi Biennale, followed by
Margarita Gonzalez on Havana Biennial, and then T. Melih Görgün
on the International Sinop Biennial and L. Igo Diarra on Rencontres
de Bamako – African Biennale of Photography.
Atteqa Malik (Vice Chairperson, Karachi Biennale Trust)

Karachi Biennale: Putting Karachi on theInternational Map and Showing Pakistani Artists to
the Local Audience
Atteqa Malik [Malik] ｜Hello everyone. Iʼm Atteqa Malik and Iʼmfrom the Karachi Biennale. This is going to be our first biennial anditʼs ended up being the largest contemporary art exhibition that
Pakistan will ever have, because our curator has gotten overambitious
and heʼs got about 140 artists so. (laughter) Itʼs quite an interesting
experience being part of the team.
Karachi is a city of 22 million people and if we could touch 1
million out of that 22 million with our biennial, we would consider
that thatʼs good. Karachi is a hidden secret. Itʼs the third largest art
scene in South Asia, after Delhi and Mumbai. Pakistani artists arebeing shown all over the world except in Pakistan. So we felt that it isvery important for them to show their works to their own audiences.
We wanted to take art out of the museum and gallery context andput it in, more or less, the public sphere. People donʼt go to galleries
because they think itʼs an elitist thing, and in order to eliminate thatstigma, we decided to move out. So weʼve secured 12 venues, some ofwhich are schools; for example, this one which is a free school run by
the government and one of our major venues. We have other schools,
cinema, and buildings which are taking part in this project.
So why a biennial in Pakistan? People in Pakistan canʼt evenpronounce the word “biennale”. (laughter) How do we explain tothem what a biennial is? Well, I think the reason why Iʼm here today,
sharing my experience, is because it puts us into a network with otherbiennials, it helps us bring our standards to an international level, andwe get to share a lot of things which we would not in usual situations.
So those are the main reasons.
Also, why in Karachi? Why does Karachi need a biennial?
Pakistan has suﬀered for the past 15 years due to the fact thatour government was supporting the United States in its war on
Afghanistan against the will of the Pakistani citizens. So Karachi
especially saw a lot of retaliation in the form of bomb attacks andmany, many innocent people died. Also in the international news
Pakistan has been portrayed as a country of terrorists, so we had hardly
any foreign visitors and our citizens almost never get visas approved
to travel to other countries. Thus Pakistanis has had to deal with asense of exclusion and misdirected hatred until very recently. Against
this backdrop, a group of artists, curators and art critics got together
84

in 2015 and said, “What can we do for our city? What can we do as
an artist community?” We decided that we wanted to have this big
event because there was an agenda for social change that we wanted
to achieve.
For example, I do a lot of workshops and Iʼd ask the children,Do
you have art classes in your school?” They say they donʼt.
“
Thereʼs no art curriculum oﬃcially because itʼs been removed by
the government. I think the idea of an intervention is much more
important than trying to bring art back into the curriculum. Having
short workshops is one of the interventions which we have been doing
in preparation for this biennial.
Karachi is a very resilient city; no matter what happens we justbounce back up and you see a lot of that in the artwork. How do you
translate your pain into something that you know, that people will
share? We have found a lot of support from everyone who lives in
Karachi for this particular event because itʼs for Karachi.
We want to put Pakistan on the international art scene. Ourartists are already being shown all over the world, and collected ininternational museums. But as I said before, our own public hasnʼtseen them yet.
So, how do you get the public ready for a biennial? Since 2015,
weʼve been holding more than 45 events including workshops andarchiving projects. We started archiving Pakistani artists during thesummer workshops. We hope that all these new things will eventuallylead to a formal art institution, towards a museum of contemporary
art. So the trustee members of the Karachi Biennale Trust have bigplans.
How do you talk about art unless thereʼs art to talk about? Weheld a public outreach program where we took abandoned cablereels that were used for electricity and asked about 40 plus artists totranslate them into works of art. The resulting artworks are being used
for the education program. This creates a context for be discussing
art in education.[4]If someone were hold a biennial in Karachi, itʼd these two people,
because they have the background and the experience. Niilofur
Farrukh has done the ASNA Clay Triennale in Karachi, Pakistan as
one of the curators, and sheʼs a member of AICA. The chief curator,
Amin Gulgee, has put together the most interesting list of artists. Heʼs
got them all to work for a minimal budget, heʼs got the international
artists to bring their own funding, and heʼs managed to get 140

DISCUSSION 1 “ Why Biennales and Triennales? New challenges, models and strategies”

4

5

artists. The rest the trustees mostly come from the art and education
field. This has been a problem for us, because we have had to facelegal problems and fund-raising problems that many of us did notinitially foresee, and we didnʼt know how to handle such issues. That issomething to think about: how do you bring a corporate managementkind of model into our big event?
This last slide shows images hot oﬀ the press.[5] This is the first
installation thatʼs ready for our event in two, three weeks. Itʼs an onsite installation called Sounds of Silence by Mahbub Jokhio. I hope thatyou can make it to the Karachi Biennale. That would be excellent.
Thank you.

world or the countries of the south but, also to the creations of themain cultural center of the West. The purpose of the Biennale isto contribute to the understanding and promotion of the artistic
production of contemporary art. These focuses have proven that there
is not a homogenous and compact block in the third world, similar
to the way that contemporary art is not a single voice, but multiple
expressions of the big and complex world of representation.
I think the importance of the Havana Biennial has been to bringemerging artists from various countries with lack of visibility to thecenter among the international events. It was our capacity to take risks
in introducing these artists with their proposals and to make themknown for the first time.
The biennial has had effective connection with the locals
through social insertion of art during our major projects carried out
in the neighborhoods and artworks put on public display. Building
relationships between the biennial and the citizens, and the spectators,
and bringing the biennial to the neighborhoods are all important to us.
The biennial has enabled the citizens to directly enjoy theartistic proposals of the invited artists. It has also enabled Cuba
to be researched on many occasions, too. The principal funderand supporter of our event is the Cultural Ministy of the Cuban
government. Many friends, art galleries, museums, foundation andothers, also help us for printing the catalog, paying the transportation
paying for the travel of artists.

Iida｜You only have three more weeks?
Malik｜Yes, three weeks (laughter).
Iida｜Thank you very much. All the best with the forthcoming event.
The next speaker is Margarita Gonzalez on Havana Biennial.

Havana Biennial: Biennial of the South Engages
with the Cuban Community
Margarita Gonzalez [Gonzalez]｜Good morning. The Wifredo Lam

Contemporary Art Center from its creation in 1983 has held as
its main objectives, to tell the story of contemporary art from thethird world, and celebrate the Havana Biennial. The biennial has its
single importance in the international scene, because it is a space forconfronting ideas and generating reflections. Its main purpose is tocontribute to the research and promotion of art in Latin America,
Caribbean, Asia, and Africa. The first Havana Biennial was held in
1984. Through the 12 editions of this event, between the founding
year and 2016, we have been privileged with the most innovative,
experimental, and artistic production of contemporary art in ourcountry. In 1984 the idea to create an event in Havana for artists,galleries, experts, and people interested in art in general, to share ideas,
thoughts, and actions was conceived. At the third edition, a platform
and a topic for reflection was established. The Havana Biennale exists
as an alternative channel for the artists who donʼt have any strong
presence in the mainstream of art at that moment.
The Havana Biennial is now open, not only to the developing

Margarita Gonzalez (Artistic Director, 12th Havana Biennial / Vice Director, Centro
de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam)DISCUSSION 1 “ Why Biennales and Triennales? New challenges, models and strategies”

85Let me talk about the next edition of Havana Biennial. We had
a terrible hurricane several weeks ago. We were initially planning tohold the next Havana Biennial between October to November thisyear, but we need to move this to 2019, perhaps between April andMay. There are people without houses in Cuba. Many institutions,theatres, galleries, have been destroyed. We need to reconstruct the
lives of the people. So the Havana Biennial will continue but it will
be six months late. We are planning to hold events that encourage
collaboration and cooperation between artists, curators, and experts,
manifested in a variety of actions. We aim for the art to form a
new path of collective understanding. We also hope to form a decentralized and spontaneous configuration to approach our public.
We hope that the artistsʼ creations will stimulate people to reflect onthemselves and enable them to listen closer to the reality in which welive.
The biennials and triennials have an important task to show themost recent productions of contemporary art around the world. The
future must be increasingly better, and we need to look at strategies
and join in our eﬀorts to find solutions in order of not to lose thisvision. In one way or the other, each biennial should show theirelements of interest and bring out the diﬀerent phenomena of art inour region. There are, and will always be, a reference and actual point
to contemporary art in our countries. Thank you.
Iida｜Thank you very much. So the next speaker is T. Melih Görgün.

Sinopale: An Independent and International
Biennial in Sinop that is Event-Driven and LocallyRooted
T. Melih Görgün [Görgün] ｜Thank you very much. My name is

T. Melih Görgün. Today, Iʼd like to present the methodology that
we have been working with for more than ten years at Sinopale, orInternational Sinop Biennial.
You will see the images in my presentation that show our artistic
and aesthetic visions as well as our methodology; in other words, how,what, and who is connecting and working together to create a bettersocial living space, whether itʼs part of our culture and creativity.
We are also a catalyzer for urban development. In the sponsor logo,
you see the Informal Görgün Network, which is a kind of an “Alicein Wonderland” adventure in the real life. What I mean is that welive a similar story in the real life. During Sinopale, we encountera lot of surreal challenges, happiness, and unexpected situations.
Furthermore, Sinopale always has a tangible maturation or outcome,just like the novel. We share the achievements, and continue to follow
the path from which we have learned and gained experience. Theysignify our thoughts and symbolize collaboration, participation, andimece. This is a Turkish word which I will talk about today, whichmeans voluntarily collaboration and participation.
Twelve years ago, I took a group of my friends to Sinop for awork visit to brainstorm what we could do together. We stayed for 15
days long to talk with the citizens, like an archaeological excavation.
It was in preparation for an international biennial in Sinop, which
was to be entitled “Sinopale.”86

Sinopale is an international biennial that aims to draw thewhole society together and develop dialogues through arts andculture, in order to trigger a process of changing the public space
for a better living environment. In most cases, such big events arefinanced by their cities, but Sinopale is not financed by the Sinopmunicipality. Being a municipality with a lot of budgetary problems,
the municipality has always been just an in-kind supporter, likemany other supporters of Sinopale. The problem of not being able
to find a main sponsor make the development and the managementof the event always very diﬃcult for us. Our event is full of risks andunforeseen situations, but also has a big advantage.
Last year, we had a coup attempt. It happened right before theopening of the Sinopale 6. It was a very dangerous and unexpectedintervention for our country, so we had to postpone our biennial
and present it this year instead. Now we have finished the event. The
collaboration with so many individuals and organizations at local,
national and international levels is what makes the event so special
and eﬀective.
As European Cultural Association, the organizer of Sinopale, webuild relationship with colleagues on a long-term basis, sustaining
it through the visions and eﬀorts of and in cooperation with theinternational curators who are responsible for the selection ofartists and program. The curators present pragmatic, functional andcommon approach to each exhibition, as well as thematic and specificdirections in order to generate a form of cross-cultural exchange withthe local context.
Sinopale is a contextual project that consists of interdisciplinary
events of diﬀerent formats. It is a process and context-oriented
biennial including art production based on research, workshop
formats and modes of sharing with the local communities andcrafts industry. It is important for us to emphasize its experimental
character which encourages art practices to bring forth new modesof productions, experiences, and circulations between the field of art
and daily lives inspired by the locality and the place.
Sinopale consists of a multitude of events presented in diﬀerent
formats. The works are urban-based as well as national− andinternational−based. They are presented so that citizens of all ages

T. Melih Görgün (Founder and Artistic Director, Sinopale)

DISCUSSION 1 “ Why Biennales and Triennales? New challenges, models and strategies”

could perceive a new idea on living spaces with a vision for the future,reflecting on urban problems and sharing the historical backgroundof collective memory.
Sinopale is an international project that is organized in thecontext of local development. We hold programs including open
air film screenings, educational programs in the Sinopale summer
academy programs, forums, Sinopale Kids, and workshops that areopen to the public and communities. We not only emphasize theasthetic values of art in the exhibitions, but also aim at building
a horizontal structure through our aesthetic events, in order toarticulate the potentials in our present sphere, as well as the challengesof the city of Sinop.
Sinopale blooms during biennial summers when we sharecommonalities, diﬀerences and knowledge in our space throughaesthetic, social, and political practices. Knowledge could point toopposite directions to the same process and can be acquired throughspecific place.
Such values are common to art and history, both being spatial
and no-linearly organized. Sinopale is in the periphery. It is ayoung biennial for contemporary art compared to the many otherinternational biennials. It is also alternative to the so-called biennial
phenomenon, not being in the center and not having the political,
economic, and aesthetic dominance. Indeed, it mobilizes personaland collective eﬀorts to collaborate on the creative edge, by crossing
the local and global perspectives, as well those of the North/South,
East/West.
It analyzes and re-signifies the biennial discourses dominatedby the logic of globalization, global-trotting art-lovers, and expensive
artworks shipped from overseas.
Sinopale is interested in other forms of resistance, and adaptionof local movements and civil society initiatives, ecological activism,and non-governmental politics, which can be re-translated as anenvironmental engagement with art and culture within the ethicalaesthetic ecologies.
Sinopale is present in the daily lives of Sinop. Children are a very
important part of Sinopale. In the first two editions of the Sinopale,
we organized workshops on innovative teaching method for the art
teachers who then applied and used it workshops for children. We
have already started to see the impacts of these workshops. Some of
the children who were workshop participants of Sinopale 1, worked
as artist assistants of Sinopale 3, 4, and 5. Now, they are leading
Sinopale. And working in the Sinopale team.
During Sinopale, we publish at least two issues of fanzine,
Sinopsis. A young team of volunteer journalists, editors and graphic
designers compile and design news and articles collected from thestakeholders of Sinopale. Sinopsis functions as a communication
platform between artists, curators, and the citizens of Sinop.
I would like to introduce to you “Helesa,” which is one of therituals carried out by the citizens of Sinop. Itʼs a cultural event that isvery prominent and valuable, but not religious.
The legend goes like this... Once upon a time the sailors were on
the shore of Sinop at the Black Sea, where Diogenes was born, andneeded to eat. They were carrying their boats on their own shoulders.
They needed to take in food for their own survival, once they reachedthe narrowest strip of Sinop. Since then, we have continued to holdthis ritual. It happens once a year, approximately in the middle of
the Ramadan days. This ritual is important because it signifies theculturally common value the people in Sinop share and is key tobroaden the context of Sinopale.
When the artists participate in Sinopale to produce the artworks
with the participation of the local citizens of Sinop, the citizens
become artisans by helping the artists. This is a participation and as aform of “learning by doing.” In addition, Sinopale is a very important
platform to bring the people together to think about their own culture
and their own future, and also, of course, about their own cities andits values. Thank you very much.
Iida｜Thank you very much. So now we got L. Igo Diarra to speak
about the African Biennale of Photography in Bamako.

African Biennale of Photography (Rencontres deBamako): The Gateway to the World for African

Photographers
L. Igo Diarra [Diarra]｜The name of the biennial I run is Rencontres

de Bamako, or the African Biennale of Photography in Mali. I have aspace called La Médina, which has a gallery and multimedia library.[6]We are based in West Africa, in the Francophone area. In our region,
there are three great events: FESPACO (biennial Festival panafricain ducinéma et de la television de Ouagadougo), a pan-African biennial of cinema
in Burkina Faso, which is an old biennial founded in 1969; Biennaleof DakʼArt, which was set up in 1992; and our African Biennale of
Photography in Bamako, which started two years later, in 1994.
After more than 23 years of dictatorship in Mali, as new
Alpha Oumar Konaré came into power as president in 1991. His
government was open to arts and culture and that enabled thefounding of Rencontres de Bamako. The first edition was set up
by two French photographers, Françoise Huguier and Bernard
Descamps, and it is now the most important African photo festival.
Itʼs like the rites of passage; every artist who need to make a career
come to this festival. For example, the most popular photographer inthe country now is Malick Sidibé. I donʼt know if you know him –Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta – both are from Mali, and SamuelFosso is from Cameroon. They have all participated in our biennial.

6

La Médina

DISCUSSION 1 “ Why Biennales and Triennales? New challenges, models and strategies”

87What is interesting is that most of the photographers who attend
the biennial in Bamako moves on to set up their own festivals. Sammy
Baloji from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was the first.
He participated in our biennial in 2007, and he set up his own festival,
Rencontres Picha, the biennial of Lubumbashi in 2008. He became
more known after he came to Bamako. Itʼs the same case with Calvin
Dondo from Zimbabwe. After the biennial in Bamako, he set up his
own Gwanza Month of Photography in Harare. The same could besaid for Aida Muluneh, who founded the Addis Foto Fest (AFF), thefirst international photography festival in East Africa based in Addis
Ababa. It seems that after Bamako, people are inspired to set up theirown biennials in their own countries.
Last year, we set up “Photo Kalo,” a small and new event, because
we felt that there was a gap between the biennials. Every two years,
a lot of people come from worldwide, and in between the biennials,
what do people do? They do nothing. So this is an occasion for us totry to work with and train Malian photographers. Photo Kalo every
two years.
For the coming biennial, which opens on December 2nd, we willhold the press conference in Paris. We work with the Institut françaisdu Mali, but this could be a problem. Since its founding, half of thebiennialʼs cost is paid by the government of Mali and the other halfby the government of France. So some people say our biennial is a
French event and we are very ashamed of that.
I will show you now a short video for the 10th edition held in2015, which was curated by Bisi Silva, so that you get a feel of Bamako.
Iʼm also showing you the image of a show in our space by the famous
Cameroonian photographer, Samuel Fosso.[7] He takes a lot of selfportraits of very well-known figures, black heroes.
So I would like to put this question on the table: What is therole of an infrastructure in the biennial? I ask this question because ina country like Mali, we do not enough space. This is very importantfor us because we have to provide space.
Final words on our biennial in Bamako. For the photographers,
itʼs the most important event. If you are an African photographer
and you want to become known, you have to pass through this event.
Thank you.
Iida｜Thank you very much. So just to start discussion, Iʼd like toremind you of the questions that I have raised earlier, while inviting

L. Igo Diarra (Director, La Mėdina)

you to bring up topics that are relevant after listening to all thepresentations. One thing that I found particularly interesting wasthat I saw some commonalities among Havana and also Bamako
and perhaps, Karachi, although Karachi has not started yet. The
commonalities are based on the sense of isolation and the necessity
to bring something for your local communities. I found that oneof the roles of biennial is to open up yourself – your country or
your community – to those outside, who are abroad and working
at international level, in order to break this sense of isolation. Thatʼswhat I saw in your brief presentations. The context and history ofeach biennial is very diﬀerent, so itʼs kind of diﬃcult (as to) where to
start our discussions right here and now.

Sustaining Biennials During the In-Between Years
Isabella Hughes [Hughes]｜I have a question. One of the things that

I noticed in the presentations is something that Iʼve been thinking a
lot about since we just finished our first Honolulu Biennial. How doyou serve your community, and stay relevant in the oﬀ-years? It wasinteresting what was said about Karachi. For three years we presented
pre-biennials, workshops, exhibitions, but there was a little confusion
because a lot of what we do locally is focused more on the local artists
and it seemed like an ongoing thing, whereas the biennial is not.
The biennials are all these amazing magic for just a few months or a
few weeks. After that, thereʼs a void. With all these diﬀerent models
from various start-ups to much more established ones, Iʼd be curious
to hear more, from all of you, about your initiatives and eﬀorts. Itʼssomething we think a lot about right now as weʼve just finished our
first edition.
Iida｜Would anyone like to respond?

7
Samuel Fosso, Black Pope, 2017
Photography courtesy of the artist andGalerie Jean Marc Patras

88

Malik｜Itʼs a very important question. I think there are a number of

DISCUSSION 1 “ Why Biennales and Triennales? New challenges, models and strategies”

factors that are driving us into sustaining this energy, but itʼs quite
exhausting actually. One of the problems is the funding. For example,
some of our funders give us a certain amount and ask us to do a certain
number of workshops; for example, six workshops in a year. So weknow that we have to do six workshops, we plan it, and this continues
even after the biennial, right? We work with local artists because itʼseasier in such a case. Such workshops are like introducing new worlds
to both the public and the artists. Bringing both worlds together, infact, is one of our aims. But we canʼt do this, in a city of 22 million,
because then, we would spread ourselves too thin, visiting one school
just once, and then never going back.
By the way, 60% of Pakistanʼs population is under 18 years. So
we are actually looking at a very young population who responds
in very diﬀerent ways: they all have mobile phones; they all have
Facebook; they all have Instagram. And thereʼs this constantbombardment of advertisement. But when we do something it has tobe very immediate and it canʼt be boring because, otherwise, theyʼdnever be interested. But when we engage with them, they always ask
us, “Are you going to come back?”
So I think one thing weʼve done is to focus on one school or
one area for that particular two years of the biennial in Karachi. The
city is big; you can drive for two hours and not reach the end of thecity. So we focus on one or two areas and then throughout the twoyears, the teachers are trained, the students experience a whole lot of
diﬀerent things, and then maybe, in the next biennial, we move toanother area. So, slowly, slowly, we keep up with the engagement.
We see ourselves in a long-term; itʼs not going to happen overnight– thatʼs what Iʼm saying.
Sylvie Fortin [Fortin]｜I think many biennials ask themselves thisquestion. It may be productive to recast this question as a contest
of temporalities. If we understand the biennial as an institution,
temporality is durational, long-term. By contrast, if we understandthe biennial as a recurring exhibition, it is a serial, short-term, finite

event. Yet, this exhibition also punctuates, makes visible, and sustains
the biennial as institution. These agonistic temporalities can lead tocontradictory, competing or converging events.
This constitutive aporia connects to my other question: how
does crisis or emergency factor in the history of biennials? Today,
it may be useful to understand that crisis or emergency are part of
the untold story of biennials, of their history. Political events haveplayed a central role in the foundation of some biennials; politicalcrisis continues to inform several biennials every year. A number ofbiennials̶such as Prospect New Orleans in the United States, theGhetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince in Haiti and the Havana Biennial̶were founded in the aftermath of an environmental catastropheor significantly impacted by it. Taking various forms̶political,
environmental, financial, institutional, media and more̶thesecrises are also increasingly frequent. So how do we conceptualize
crisis or emergency as a constitutive condition of biennials withoutnormalizing it?

Opening up to the PublicGörgün｜Sinopale is the “other” biennial; it is a kind of platform

and initiatives that we do every two years. That is why, technically, thename of our event is “biennial”. Of course, in between the two years,
we do a lot of projects, including training projects for the children
and also for the women. We are also working with the civil initiatives
and associations of Sinop to help them expand their visions.
Sinop is a very small city facing the Black Sea. There areapproximately 40,000 residents in the city center. Sinop was a very
important region during the Hellenistic Period and later, during
the Ottoman Empire, too. Sinop had a prison which housed
philosophers, writers, and also the opposition leaders. During theCold War, Sinop had the biggest NATO base in Europe due to its
proximity to the Soviet Union. As you see, Sinop was a very important
place geopolitically. Now the situation has changed, and we face[left] Isabella Hughes(Director, Honolulu Biennial
Foundation)[right] Sylvie Fortin(Independent Curator / former
Executive and Artistic Director,
Biennale de Montréal)

DISCUSSION 1 “ Why Biennales and Triennales? New challenges, models and strategies”

89financial diﬃculties. We donʼt have any industries in Sinop, so
tourism has the biggest economic value now. We are using all cultural
assets for tourism.
Sinopale has been a promotor of tourism, but we are notcalling ourselves a tool for the tourism. It is, rather, a kind of alifelong learning system. When we invite the artists, they comevoluntarily to work in Sinop, like in an artist-in-residence program.
For approximately seven or ten days, they come and work with the
Sinop citizens to produce artworks. This is the system of learning by“doing,” thus the artists learn from the citizens and then the citizens
learn from the artists.
The childrens come for the training sessions and the children
workshops, and also women come every day as volunteers to help us.
It is kind of a cultural development platform. Itʼs a meeting center tomake art and do something in the cultural sector.
Sinop has a lot of space. We are opening doors and letting theowners know how they can use their spaces, and then they give thekeys to us, so we use them for the biennial. Even if itʼs one room, on
the ground floor, or one big house, they are all important spaces forus.
Four years ago, we turned the old market place into a cultural
center, like a creative hub. Inside, there are tailors, some butchers,
and some vegetable vendors, a kind that you would see in the oldmovies. Itʼs looking very nice and romantic. Now weʼre helping ourmunicipality to change the area, not for gentrification, of course. We
are painting the place and weʼre helping to them to stay there andweʼre finding some customers. When the artists need something fromthe local people, the tailors, women, children, vendors, etc., come tohelp. It means Sinopaleʼs working. We sustain ourselves through thismovement. If we want funding from the other people – municipality,
government, etc. – we can wait (laughter). Thank you very much.
Gonzalez｜We also use diﬀerent spaces in Havana since the firstedition. I remember I was young student at the Havana University,and there was a workshop by a very important artist in the park. Such
relationship with the public is very important. Daniel Buren, a very
important artist from France, was in Casablanca, a small town by the
Havana Bay, to work in a train station. The residents of the very, verysmall town were happy to have helped the artist paint their local train
station. Michelangelo Pistoletto did a performance in the cathedral
square, working with the art students and musicians. Havana
Biennaleʼs relationship with the art school is also very important. They
also support us during the project of the artists and I think that thisis the most important principle – collaboration. This was our theme
for the 12th edition in 2015, “Between the Idea and Experience”.
Diarra｜We also have programs with schools at the biennial in

Bamako. The school program for 100 schools comes in two parts.
One is a program where schools could benefit from an introduction tophotography by photographers. The other is visits to the exhibitions
by the school children. The aim is to raise young people's awareness of
the art so that we could increase our audience in quantity and quality
in the future.

90

Lewis Biggs(Curator, Folkstone Triennial)

Sustaining while Responding to Change
Iida｜Thank you for the interesting questions and responses. I

particularly found it interesting that there are diﬀerent directions in
our interests. One is how can we sustain the biennial, maintainingthat important characteristic of your own; the other is how we canrespond to and contextualize the emergency, because biennials, which
are organized every two or three years, need to be timely and meetthose public moments. The crises or the situations may change by thetime you organize the next edition.
How has Havana, since you have a longer history than the otherthree biennials presented today, maintained the importance of yourbiennial in the changing climate?
Gonzalez｜The Havana Biennial, when it opened in 1984, hadprobably not foreseen undergoing so much change through every
edition. The first Havana Biennale was only for Latin American
artists, but from the second edition, the curatorial team understoodthat it was very important to open to countries from Africa and Asian
countries. After then, the many important artists that we have worked
with have strengthened their relationships with other new biennials,
other projects, other curators around the world. This is very importantbecause we face new challenges in the way we think.
We have also looked to other directions, looking at new
perspectives of the art in the communities. In the last edition of the
Biennial, we presented many works related to the music of the theaterby artists working in that field. It was very interesting because itʼs
not only installations, photos, paintings, and sculptures – it was
mixed. Contemporary art is very complex. So for every edition, we
try to present new ideas, projects, and proposals to reach the livesof the people. And we do this step-by-step because each biennial
is diﬀerent. And we try to change the model, or the structure. We
use, in some cases, the same buildings, but use another building orwork with another institution in other editions. Thoughts and ideas
are always shifting and the audience in Havana is always waiting forour event. We are building a platform for the public. And throughour editions, itʼs possible for the art students to see Michaelangelo

DISCUSSION 1 “ Why Biennales and Triennales? New challenges, models and strategies”

the oﬃcial sponsors want to make this the opportunity to celebrate
tourism or the economy or revitalization. We all know this tension
happens everywhere in biennials but actually, neither is the purpose of
the biennial. In my view, the purpose of the biennial is in the name:biennial, triennial, documenta; actually, it doesnʼt matter how often
you have it. The point is that it is a repetition. It is recurrent. And
the purpose of the biennials, festivals, whatever you call it, is to lookat change. This is why it is recurrent. The purpose is to look again at
what the situation is and measure the change. So the purpose is tomeasure the change. And this breaks the opposition between the local
and global. Our relationship between the local and global is changing
all the time. We measure this through a biennial or a triennial. The
relationship between the artists and their audience is changing all thetime. So we measure this by making a biennial or a triennial.

Pistoletto, Daniel Buren, Marina Abramović, Ilya Kabakov and manyother important artists. The artists stay for 10 days, 15 days, and theymeet students as well as Cuban artists. Itʼs important that Havana
Biennial put on this stage for sharing ideas.
Diarra｜So getting back to the question on sustainability, or stability– in our case, it could depend on the political situation. For example,
our African Biennale of Photography was set up in 1994, but wecould not hold the 10th edition in 2013, due to the Mali Crisis
that occurred in 2012. The biennial made a comeback with its 10thedition in 2015. But even for this yearʼs edition, whenever I travel,
people would ask me, “Will you open your biennial this year?” Iʼdsay, “Why you ask me that? Itʼs open! This year it will open!” I am
always asked if we will make it. That is because one part of the funds
come from France – this is also very problematic – because thegovernment of Mali just assumes that they would burden only halfof the budget. They donʼt realize that itʼs one of the most important
events in Mali, itʼs an opportunity to showcase the country, becausepress, curators, and museum related professionals come fromworldwide. But the politicians donʼt understand the value.
For example, our Minister of Art and Culture, a well-educatedperson, didnʼt realize the importance of the catalog. Once sheunderstood the importance, she took the catalogs and gave them topeople. The government thinks our biennial is just for a few people
or for foreign interest. So we try to educate them. We make programsfor concerned people, because most biennials, sometimes itʼs for somepeople and not for locals. Thatʼs also the challenge for the curator;
how to make the biennial on an international level, and also to talkto the local audience.

The Purpose of the Biennial as a Recurring Event
Lewis Biggs [Biggs]｜I wanted to say thank you for your helpful

analysis on the Japanese situation at the beginning. It was fascinating.
I think we all know about the tension between the objective of thecitizen and the objective of the artists. Because the artists want to use
the biennial for professional development, sales, and fame, whereas

Ling Min｜I just want to follow up and make a case through an
example of Shanghai Biennale. The curators for the first edition of the
Shanghai Biennale were all Chinese. Then in 2006, they started towork with foreign curators. Then they stopped working with Chinese
curators. The last two editions are curated by international curators
only. Thatʼs the history and the changes they have been making. There
are a lot of stories behind this.
Also, there are many biennials and triennials in Japan. But who
do you want to attract? Do you just want to attract the local people,
or do you want to attract the international people? Depending on theanswer, the focus would be diﬀerent.
Yesterday, I posted information on Yokohama on social media
and many people responded. This year, all Chinese cares about isdocumenta and Münster Sculpture Project. Together with Venice,many Chinese go to these events. What do you want the people tolook at when they see your biennial?
Dolly Kola=Balogun [Kola]｜I really liked what was said about the

purpose of the biennial being about repetition, recurrence, looking
at change and measuring change. The upcoming Lagos Biennial isin its first edition and we are going to open in three weeks, just likethe Karachi Biennale. The Lagos Biennale is taking place on the
backdrop of historical Lagos that weʼve achieved through a series ofexperimental installations but the main center of where the biennialʼsgoing to take place is in an old railway station. So the theme ofthis biennial is “Living on the Edge.” Itʼs about re-thinking and reimagining: the former which is a logical mental exercise, and the latterbeing, an attempt to reach the fringes of fantasy.
Lagos is historically a slave town. It was a trade route, and it
was kind of seen as a gate-keeping center for tax and trade, between
the New World and Africa. But this biennial is about reimagining
Lagos in its contemporary context, for example, its environmental
degradation and economic situation. Itʼs a city of 20 million people– very similar to Karachi actually – very multi-ethnic, very multireligious, and diverse. The question now is: how do we reimagine
Lagos as the most populous city in Africa, in its contemporary
context? How do we reach the fringe of society in this urban domain?
Right now, the art and culture is very elitist in Nigeria. Itʼs just for afew, the very few, middle-class and the upper-class. So this biennial

DISCUSSION 1 “ Why Biennales and Triennales? New challenges, models and strategies”

91

is diﬀerent from the other festivals that weʼve had in Lagos in thesense that itʼs taking place in the heart of the city, taking place in thepoorest areas. So the question now is: how is this biennial going toshape itself? How does it impact the average citizen? What does itmean to have a biennial within the city? How does it aﬀect the average
life of a Nigerian citizen, of an African, of a citizen of the world? So
I think this question of diﬀerentiating biennials in terms of how it isexperienced by the citizens and how itʼs experienced by the artists andthe curators, what the objectives are. I think these are very importantand Iʼd like to hear more about that.

curatorial team reflects the sense of time.
Before we close this session, I would like to ask about thediﬀerence between the recurrent exhibitions organized by the art
museum and that of biennials? Because both can organize recurrent
cultural events and keeping engaging with the community. But
biennials probably have a diﬀerent function by the way of engaging
with the community. Anybody have a brief comment?

Biennials and Museums / Biennials vs Museums
Diarra｜About your question on museums, the director of the

Who Owns the Biennial?
Malik｜I have a question that doesnʼt need to be answered now. Who
can own a biennial? There was a recent incident that triggers thisquestion. It was interesting to see that there are so many biennials
and triennials in Japan. Yet you mentioned that many were run by asingle figure or a brand. Can biennials become a brand?
Iida｜What I meant to say is that itʼs centralized.
Malik｜Okay. So if somebody wants to have another biennial in

Karachi tomorrow, is that okay? I mean, what happens? We justwent through a legal battle because somebody had registered Karachi
Biennial in 2014; the owner never used it but she sued all oursponsors. So we had to purchase the name from her and use most of
our funding for that. So what gives you the right to own a biennial?
Görgün｜So what I did is that I paid money to a patent institute inTurkey to get registered. Itʼs one way to solve the problem, maybe. The
biennial is very important in Turkey and everybody wants to makea biennial for each city. But they donʼt know how to do biennials.
Because I was born and raised in Sinop, I know the place and I can
do a biennial in Sinop, but it would not be possible for other people
to do the same.
We have a system, thus we have many curators for each biennial,
more than two or three, sometimes even six. But one team member
from Sinopale is always there as a curator to explain the situationin Turkey. Because the social and political situations changes everyday. Those events is helping to bring the cultures together. And thebiennials or triennials is a platform also for the mutual understanding
between the diﬀerent cultures.
Iida｜I think itʼs time to wrap up although itʼs almost impossible
to wrap up because we discussed so many things. But let us review
some points we have discussed so far. How do you serve for yourcommunity? We talked about the tension between sustainability
and the temporality of making the event timely, and also thetension between the biennial organizers and the artists. We were also
reminded that biennials are a recurrent event, so you have the time
to look back your achievements or history and, perhaps, your hopes
to keep engaging with the community for the better future. Also,
structure of funding could influence the programming. Shanghai
Biennaleʼs case was introduced, in which the structure of the92national museum was appointed as the director of the biennial in
Bamako. Initially, people reacted and said, “Oh, the director of themuseum is the director of the biennial?” But in our case, we havebeen lucky to have a vibrant person and the museum functions
like a gateway into the biennial. The museum is youthful andcontemporary. The museum is the biennialʼs main venue. So I think
the relationship between the museum and the biennials depend on
whoʼs in charge and the orientation of the museum. If the person is
open to the contemporary art, it could work very well. Thatʼs the casefor Mali.
Kola｜In Nigeria, we do have a museum in Lagos, but like inPakistan, theyʼre mostly historical art and not contemporary art. We
have a lot of galleries and the galleries are mainly based in the city
center and as I mentioned earlier, they only reach a very small segmentof the population.
The significance of this biennial in Lagos, in contrast to theregular exhibitions by galleries, is that itʼs bringing the art directly tothe people. We are going to have the exhibitions and film screenings
in areas that your average middle-class or elite Nigerians might notthink of going to. Our format forces the individual to go out into thecity, seek those places, and engage in the local community. I also thinkthat the biennial will embody the spirit of the city in a very diﬀerent
way than the museums or the galleries.
The Lagos Biennial is organized by a foundation called the Àkéte
Foundation, whose members are mainly artists, so that also takes thepower away from certain institutions that maybe control the narrativeof contemporary art. Our biennial directly connects to the artists or
art lovers and people who just want to experience art for the first time.
So I think biennials are unique in the sense that they are freer, as you
said, and I think they are more authentic in my opinion.
Biggs｜Having been both a museum director and a biennial founder,

I would agree that you could do both, but it depends entirely on thesituation. I founded Liverpool Biennial when I was the director of Tate
Liverpool, so it was possible to bring the reputation of Tate in order tostart the biennial going. And then I resigned from Tate because (after
10 years as director there) it was more interesting for me to become chief
executive and the artistic director of the Biennial than to continue towork at the Tate.
Also, very importantly – I have to say this at some point today– with my budget at the Tate, we were able to spend about 10% of
the total turnover on art and education. Everything to do with art or

DISCUSSION 1 “ Why Biennales and Triennales? New challenges, models and strategies”

education was managed within just 10% of our total turnover. 90%of the funding had to go on supporting the building, supporting thestaﬀ – everybody knows this problem. Biennials are freer, much more
free. So this is a very good reason why biennials should exist alongsidemuseums, or even instead of museums, because actually, they aremuch better value for the city purely in terms of art-for-money.
Iida｜Thank you for your responses. A lot of biennials use publicsphere as their base or platform, because that could be a better place
to interact with the community and the people than a white cube.
And the point made by Lewis on the financial structure of museums
are very common among many institutions.
I think Berlin Biennale puts a strong emphasis on the biennial
being free space for practitioners. We often face constraints, but
Berlinʼs position is that biennials should be a free platform for thepractitioners to work seriously. That resonates with what was just said
about biennials being a much freer sphere and a good value.
Gabriele Horn ｜ Yes, the Berlin Biennale will always keep the

Biennale free from all other interests (political, touristic, economically, art
market oriented).

I would say the founding procedure of a biennial is also always
based on a special context and this special context will sometimes
influence the direction of a biennial in general. For example, if there areno museums in the city, the founding procedures or the initiatives to dobiennials are often set up based and related to the fact, that the (artists)
community needs a platform to be active in the field of contemporary
art. It could be a biennial first and then a collection and/or a Museumof Contemporary Art, letʼs say 10, 20, or 30 years later.
Often in Asia, it seems that the reason for organizing biennials
are to promote tourism for the city or some public agenda of thatcity, and the biennials are founded by the authorities, either by thestate or by the city. Berlin started as a private initiative, so it was
initially based on private funding from those who loved art. It was in

the 1990s after the Berlin Wall came down and there was no space,no contemporary art museums, no galleries or even no non-profit
spaces for presentations by the younger, emerging international or
Berlin-based artists. So this is why we founded the Berlin Biennale.
There was an initiative that came out from the KW Institute ofContemporary Art, and we continue to have a strong relationshipwith this institution. But we are not related to a museum, whichkeeps us more free – in the meantime, we are funded by the Cultural
Foundation of the Federal State, which means we are public.
But when asked the diﬀerence between a biennial curator and a
museum curator, I would say that being a biennial curator is totallydiﬀerent from being a curator in a museum which is based on along-term vision, in terms of keeping and collecting knowledge andcollecting art. Biennials can always react to social changes much fasterthan museums; biennials can be more experimental, more risky. This
is why it is so important to have the format of a biennial.
If a biennial is one division or department of a museum, themuseum will probably have their own interests – for example, theircollection. In that case, biennial curators may be asked to curate abiennial in that direction, in which the collection of the museum
could benefit from the newly produced and commissioned works inthe frame of the biennial.
But Iʼd say keep all biennials free, or at least try to keep them
free from those interests because otherwise you get more regulated byinterests coming from outside as you want. This is why Iʼm happy tohave the Berlin Biennale free from other interests. Of course, on theother hand, I am interested in finding ways to make commissioned
works by the Berlin Biennial, which are produced with public money,
become part of a public collection in the future. But in general, I
would say, keeping biennials free from all other interests guarantees
the most artistic freedom for the participants.
Iida｜Thank you very much for all the contributions.

Gabriele Horn

(Director, Berlin Biennale)

DISCUSSION 1 “ Why Biennales and Triennales? New challenges, models and strategies”

93Bige Örer (Director, Istanbul Biennale / IBA Vice-Presidents)

DISCUSSION 2“ How do we develop professional skills
in biennales and triennales? ”
Hoashi Aki [Hoashi]｜I am now inviting you to this discussion, “Howdo we develop professional skills in biennales and triennales?” Here, I
would like to focus on developing professional skills in biennials andtriennials.
Today, we have Bige Örer from Istanbul, Turkey, Riyas Komu
from Kochi, India, and Thiago de Paula Souza from São Paulo, Brazil
now working for the Berlin Biennale. Bige has experience exchanging
her staﬀ with the Liverpool Biennial. Kochi has now completed
three editions and Riyas and his team is thinking about developing
his organization with a longer-term vision. When I went to Kochi
I found a lot of young professionals working there. Thiago is partof the curatorial team of Berlin Biennale. I am curious to see how
he sees himself working in Germany, in a diﬀerent cultural context
from his own. Many Japanese biennials/triennials teams are hardly
international, so such experiences are very interesting for us.

Istanbul Biennial: Managing Crisis and Developingof Young Professionals
Bige Örer [Örer]｜Good morning. As the director of the Istanbul
Biennial, I have worked for the Biennial for 15 years, developing it
into a biennial that is more international in scale. I would like totalk based on the four questions I have been asked prior to making
this presentation: an overview of our biennial; how our organization
works; how we build up our teams; and what do we do in order toimprove their skills?
The Istanbul Biennial was established in 1987 by the Istanbul
94

Foundation for Culture and Arts, which is a non-profit and nongovernmental organization that also organizes other activities
throughout the year, such as the film festival, theater festival, music
festival and jazz festival, as well as the Design Biennial. We arealso responsible for organizing the Pavilion of Turkey at the Venice
Biennale. We also run a residency program in Paris Cité des Arts.
So among the many events we do throughout the year, I am mainly
responsible for the Istanbul Biennial and I work as the advisor to thePavilion of Turkey, and the Cité des Arts program.
I just wanted to start with this visual material which presents
the current edition of the Istanbul Biennial, which is titled “a goodneighbour.” We try to come up with diﬀerent and experimental
exhibition-making strategies for each and every edition of thebiennial, and for the first time in the history of the biennial, we haveinvited artists (Elmgreen & Dragset) to work with us as curators.
Iʼm giving this example to also talk about the flexibility of
the institution. Carlos Basuardo said that the reason biennials areimportant is because they can be very flexible; thatʼs what is diﬀerent
from, maybe, more stable institutions, such as museums which may
find it hard to make decisions that change things. In the format of thebiennial, we are able to transform things depending on the current
conditions and context.
As the Istanbul Biennial, we have a small but multitasking andenthusiastic team. We have four full-time members dedicated toworking only for the biennial, but under the foundation which is ourumbrella organization we also have corporate departments like media
relations, marketing, sponsorship, financial relations, and human

DISCUSSION 2 “ How do we develop professional skills in biennales and triennales?”resources, which provide services to the biennial as well as otherartistic departments of the foundation. We are a non-governmentalorganization and we hardly have any public funding. For each andevery edition of the biennial, we need to make a grant application to
the Ministry of Culture and to the Ministry of Foreign Aﬀairs to get
the promotion fund. But these funding make up only 3 to 4% of thetotal budget. So we need to really fundraise a lot and get support fromthe private companies. We also collaborate with many international
institutions. We have also developed the Council of Biennial Friends
and Patrons, from which we gather support from individuals tomostly support the production of new works and development oflearning programs and public programs.
There was a question about how we recruit your team and what
we find as important in people whom we hire. For us, itʼs really
important to have young people working for the biennial because youneed endless energy and you need the desire to work for the biennial.
You are asking people to stop having their own lives for maybe for
2 to 3 months during the time of installation and production of theexhibition. During that time, you cry together, you laugh together,and you kind of create your own family.
Crisis management is also very important, because there are somany small and big crises in biennials. I think being calm, trying tofind solutions, and not forgetting to smile is something important
to start with...and, of course, passion in contemporary art. Iʼm notsaying experience and knowledge because I think the team builds up
their professional skills and careers by working for the biennial. Manyof my colleagues say that after working for the biennial, they feel thatthey can do everything. Whenever they move to other jobs, they tellme that they donʼt get to do a lot of things. So I think the experiencecreates this kind of base for feeling confident and that you can doanything in the world.
Now, I will talk about this great exchange program that I
developed with Sally Tallant, the Director of the Liverpool Biennial.
We were earlier discussing how we could learn from each otherʼsexperiences and how we can support our team. So we decided to do
this exchange program and from Istanbul, we sent Ozkan Canguven
to stay in Liverpool during the installation period of the last Liverpool
Biennial and work with the artists directly. From Liverpool, we havea great education curator, Polly Brannan, who is now working with
our educational team and building up a program for young people.
She is also working on a sound art project that involves young people.
This will be relayed to Liverpool and she will follow up to work withthe youngsters in Liverpool. This exchange is not only about, letʼs say,practical support, but itʼs also about how we develop curatorial skills
in our teams, which is important.
Lastly, I have been thinking about what we would do in order todevelop the young people in our team. I think itʼs very important thatthey are involved in the curatorial process of the exhibition-making
along with allowing all the exhibition coordinators to be involved inthis.
So here you see the artist Volkan Arslan from Istanbul during
our first two visits.[1] His work is one of the highlights of the biennial:
a video installation, talking about two neighbors traveling on the
Bosphorus together. It is really a poetic piece. As in this case, we do

1Visiting Volkan Arslanʼs studio, 2016

artistsʼ portfolio reviews, we do research visits, we do artist talks and
we do some satellite exhibitions, not only in Istanbul but also in
diﬀerent cities in Turkey and also out of Turkey.
This year, we collaborated with the Lesvos municipality, andwe did an exhibition of Volkan Arslan in Lesvos, which is one of theclosest Greek islands to Turkey. We thought it was important to dosomething also in Greece because we were talking about the goodneighbor.
Publications are also very important because publications would
stay after the exhibition. This year we did one exhibition book andone story book, from which you can find 69 stories from all aroundthe world about whoʼs the good neighbor.
Weʼre also creating platforms for young curators. For example,
for this edition, we have invited a very young collective to do an
exhibition at the ground floor of the foundation and also to do reading
sessions every two weeks. They do reading sessions here and there,
and also invite artists, curators and professionals to be with them.
My last slide shows how the visual images of the biennial in
the last 30 years. We have worked with curators from all around theworld. The 7th Istanbul Biennial was curated by the Japanese curator,
Hasegawa Yuko. You can see how the visual identity of the biennialchanged throughout the years. Thank you.
Hoashi｜Thank you. Let me hand over the microphone to Riyas

Komu.

Kochi-Muziris Biennale: Making an Artistic
Intervention and Building an Infrastructure for Art
Riyas Komu [Komu]｜Good morning, everyone. When I heard thetitle of the Istanbul Biennial, “a good neighbour,” I thought that it issomething we should be doing in India, because I always feel thatʼs
the role of the biennial in todayʼs context. In India, our eﬀort is tomake the biennial something that is very exciting and something thatwill become helpful for the people who live around us.
We started the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2010 after having avery interesting conversation with the Culture Minister and also the
Education Minister of Kerala. At that time, we had a communist
government, which has a legacy of leading many cultural projects,
including one of the best film festivals, one of the best literature
festivals and theatre festivals in India. But visual art was somethingthat was lacking in Kerala, so it was in that conversation we proposed

DISCUSSION 2 “ How do we develop professional skills in biennales and triennales?”95

to do a biennial, not just to contribute to the visual culture but, also at
the same time, to look at the larger India which was shifting towards
a very diﬀerent kind of a political framework.[2]Four years since then, in 2014, the right-wing government cameinto power. Our eﬀort to create a biennial as an artistic intervention
was happening. The biennial, as a project to celebrate the diversity
and also the multicultural aspect of India, would be one of the mostimportant artistic or political or social interventions one could do ata time like this. So maybe I would anchor the reason for holding thebiennial in Kochi to these factors.
3,000 years of Muzirisʼ history, and the larger cosmopolitan
legacy of Kochi became vital in executing the project. Kochi is aplace where more than 30 communities are living together and 16
languages are spoken. We do the biennial in an area of 4 squarekilometers, so the biennial is like a plot where the idea of Indiaʼs
diversity is being celebrated.
It is a biennial initiated by artists and we continue with thislegacy. We always invite a curator who is an artist. The first edition
was curated by the founders, myself and Bose Krishnamachari; thesecond was curated by Jitish Kallat, a celebrated Indian artist; and thelast edition was curated by Sudarshan Shetty, another prominent artistof the country. The next edition is going to be curated by a female
artist for the first time. Iʼll speak about her later.
So as I explained earlier, the Kerala governmentʼs involvementin the biennial was very crucial, as an agency which supports liberty
and plurality in society. One of their missions is to become a catalyst
in unifying society which is suﬀering from the eﬀect of polarization.
So working on that mission became one of our prominent activities.
What weʼve been able to do in Kochi was to get the community
to work along with us to make the biennial. It is a kind of exercise ofbuilding infrastructure and talking about some of the most importantcurrent issues. So, in fact, the biennial, as it progressed with our
exhibitions, has been empowering our society through culturalprojects. Those working with us are actually getting trained to be partof a cultural project that hosts international cultural initiatives which
has enjoyed a huge attendance.
Kerala is 100% literate. It set up the first communist government

in our countryʼs history; the first synagogue in the region is here; thefirst church in the region is here; and the first mosque is here. So it isan open city which has received many cultures and discourses, and thebiennial has become an ongoing exercise that feeds into that context.
What would an organization like Kochi Biennale Foundation
do? Since we are an artist-initiated project, we focus on production ofart. Whatever money we make, we would invest in producing art. It is
this particular focus that has made the system, administration, or eventhe government, aware how it is important to build an infrastructure
for the arts and, at the same time, protect the heritage with which we
all live.
How do we develop our programs to do that? This is just to share
our system. But as Bige was saying itʼs all about capacity to take risk,
capacity to love each other and to sacrifice your time. I think biennials
have become generally that kind of an organization. I meet people
across the world, and they always tell a similar story. Itʼs also about
the passion, sleepless nights and coming together to manage risk.
We used to have one oﬃcer in our biennial who was the
youngest one in our team. She came from a software backgroundbut she became passionate in working for art. Sheʼs now in Dubai.
We used to call her CM in the first edition of the biennial; CM for“crisis manager.” I think such transformation of an individual is oneof the most important aspects. Why am I emphasizing this? The
organizational structure like ours is not unique. Itʼs a structure thatmany organizations have, but because India is not a country where
you have great art infrastructure, and doesnʼt have institutions which
produce many art administrators, Kochi has become a production
house of administrators. We have become a platform for people, too.
In fact, when we started, we had only one expert who had somekind of experience. She had worked for the Liverpool Biennial. So we
hired her as curatorial coordinator to work for me and Bose. Other
than that, we never had any experts being invited to work in ourorganization. So we were giving opportunities to people who have
inclination to art and they learn through work. They are literally
taking a lot of risks and learning and working overtime. Those whohave been trained in Kochi are now spread across India and working
in diﬀerent organizations. We are becoming an interesting platform

Riyas Komu

(Co-Founder, Kochi Biennale
Foundation / Artist / Curator)

for training. Our team for the last edition had more than 120 people
at the time of biennial. Now we have only 18 people working in ouroﬃce.
The biennial director is also the president of the foundation.[3]I am the director of programs but I am also the secretary of thefoundation. So Iʼve got a lot of administrative job to do. We have avery good advisory board which includes political figures, writers,
and social entrepreneurs. We also have a working committee. We are
actually multi-tasking at many levels to save the cost while using our
expertise to train people.
As for the curator, we have always tried to facilitate the curator
with people whom she or he is familiar. So the curator might behaving an experience of working with somebody whoʼs a good writer.
We always give that fresh chance to the curators. This year, we have
injected two new people who are very familiar with our new curator.
So that part of the organization works with a very diﬀerent kind ofchemistry. The rest remains the same.
This year we have taken a very strong decision to build a teamfor the future. For the last three editions, we changed the team every
time, and we learned a lot. And now we are training a team which
will take care of the next edition of the biennial, as well as the coming
editions. This is immediately giving us a lot of interesting results.
They are responding very passionately because they are going to bepermanent staﬀ. Last year, in between the edition of the biennial, we
appointed a CEO to strengthen the administrative side.
I would like to introduce the Studentsʼ Biennale, an importantarea for which Kochi is now known.[4] Through this program, thefoundation is slowly building a diﬀerent kind of art administrative
structure and empowering the youngsters to become artists. Last year
we had 500 studentsʼ work exhibited in Kochi. 56 art institutions
from all across the country participated. This year, we are changing
the model. We are changing the format of the administration andturning it into a forum where neighboring countries can be part
we are selecting students who are from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Afghanistan, Nepal, and Bhutan for this platform. From the last six
years of experience, we learned that Kochi should become platform formany youngsters who want to learn how to make art, how to become
confident, and how to remain as an artist.
“History Now” is seminars and talks programs. “ABC” is “Artby Children,” in which we carried out in 100 schools last year andwill continue. All these things translate into number, which becomes amessage to the government which doesnʼt take art seriously in schools.
So we are having a conversation with the government. This year weare changing the ABC model, from the biennial being a catalyst that
goes into school classrooms, to working with 150 schools around thebiennial location and starting art classes. We are going to fund schools
so that it becomes another structural development.
We have an art cinema and also “Pepper House residency
programs” where we have international artists coming and stayingin Kochi. We have started an exchange program, and this year, we
exchange with the UAE. “Arts & Medicine” is another program. For“video lab”, we have around eight people who are working in ouroﬃce doing only video recording and archiving, and telecasting.
This is all about showing a model to the government and also

2

3

4

5

DISCUSSION 2 “ How do we develop professional skills in biennales and triennales?”97

making a cultural organization work in todayʼs context. You canʼtjust bring in a biennial every two years like a parachute and sustain
it. You need to fill in the gap by becoming an organization whichworks 365 days. We are now negotiating with the government to give
us more time and space and money. We are now working on getting
a permanent venue for the biennial and the government is taking it
quite seriously.
Just to give you some numbers.[5] The first edition had 80 artists
from 23 countries. We are trying to grow slowly, Kochi has historically
had exchanges and relationships with the larger world, and we aretrying to trace such lineage through our project. We had more than
200 new works produced in the last three editions, and this fact
has become one of the key contributions of our biennial. It is also
an exercise to see how the biennial can become very important as apolitical intervention. So we give the artists a lot of importance in ourcontext.
We are trying to become a driving force to change our existing
infrastructure. Kochi was a sleepy town but, in the last ten years, it hascompletely revived. Recently, KPMG, an international corporation,
did a study to show how a biennial could slowly change an entire social
infrastructure. Now the government has announced the Smart City
Programme, which is again going to touch on the infrastructure.
So the last point Iʼm going to note is that we are not just looking
at each edition and telling a story, but we are trying to invest into the
future. “ABC” and student biennale projects are the two investmentsthat we have made. Anita Dube is the first famale curator whoʼs goingto curate the next edition, and I would very much relate the future
prospect of the biennial with the next edition because Anita is oneof the most promising political artists of the country and sheʼs done
many important projects. If you really look at whatʼs happening inIndia today, for example, compared to the situation in Japan that waspresented earlier, Kochi is the opposite, as it is the only major culturalintervention responding to the political change. Anita expressed that
it will be our huge responsibility in accommodating her becausesheʼs going to think very politically, sheʼs going to accommodate
alternate voices and talk about that and sheʼs going to think about themarginalized society. Sheʼs also going to talk about the third gender
big in the coming-up edition. As an artist, I have a feeling that it
would work to mix the concept of that particular edition with theprogress of the structure of biennial organization. Next year we will
have to deal with a lot of important social issues, so maybe we will
inject them into the organization and deal with the contents.
I give a lot of credit to the curators who are coming in for eachof our edition. They actually change and nurture the organizationʼscredibility and recommend the way to move forward. Iʼm sure withthe comment Anitaʼs already made in public, in newspapers and inmagazine reviews, it is actually giving a signal to the Indiaʼs young
generation that the next edition will be a provocation to the system
which is ruling us. I would look at the next edition of the biennial as
lot of work and a lot of careful intervention. But I would give a lot ofimportance in junctions like this, because then people with essential
understanding about history and knowledge and writing about art
could play a bigger role than just an administrator. I would like tothink about Kochiʼs intervention next year around what Anita thinks.
98

Thank you.
Hoashi｜Bige and Riyas have shared with us two very diﬀerent

contexts of biennials. Riyas is moving on to the next phase ofdeveloping his organization. Bigeʼs presentation on the exchange
program was interesting. In Japan, we find language and the legal
aspects diﬃcult to exchange staﬀ, but an exchange would be good forboth the staﬀ and the organization.
Iʼd like to now hand over the microphone to Thiago de Paula
Souza. He will present a very diﬀerent perspective. Iʼd like him to talknot about organizations, but about career development as a young
educator and curator.

São Paulo Biennial / Berlin Biennale: Working as
Educator and Curator
Thiago de Paula Souza｜Good morning. Iʼm Thiago de Paula
Souza from São Paulo. Iʼm not directly connected to any biennial.
Currently, Iʼm a member of the curatorial team of the Berlin Biennale.
By the way, living in São Paolo gave me my first contact with the ideaof biennials through the São Paulo Biennial. São Paulo Biennial isone of the major mainstream biennials in the world, but it has very
interesting and experimental elements, while leaving possibilities ofnon-expert audience to visit the exhibition.
The São Paulo Biennial is based in the pavilion based in the
Ibirapuera Park, a very big urban park. On the other side, we have theMuseu Afro Brasil, which is a public museum where I spent part of
my career working as an educator. Museu Afro Brasil is Afro-Brazilian
Museum in Portuguese. There are several other artistic institutionsin the park, such as the modern art museum and the contemporary
art museum. So itʼs a public park where everyone can go and gather.
Although itʼs in a very wealthy neighborhood, working-class andlow-income families visit this park and the artistic spaces, such as theMuseu Afro Brasil, the biennial exhibition, and the contemporary
art museum, because their admissions are free. That makes a lot of
diﬀerence.
Iʼm going to talk a little bit about my work in Museo Afro Brasil.
Museo Afro Brasil is a very new institution that was founded in 2004.
It is a bit late, considering the African heritage and all the Africanpresence in Brazil. It was founded with the aim to reorganize theBrazilian art history or our perspectives on Brazilian history. Maybesome of you are familiar, but Brazil was one of the countries thatreceived one of the highest number of enslaved men and women fromthe African continent. It was the last country to abolish the slave tradein the late in the 19th century. Brazil may be known for its myth of
the racial democracy, but itʼs really a myth. It is very diﬃcult to makea comparison, but itʼs a country with several racial issues that are yet
to be solved.
I think our society could never really deal with, or organize an
open discussion about the slave trade history. We still have the colonial
ghosts haunting us. Most of the Brazilian population would neversay that we are a post-colonial society. The colonial past is basicallyignored or taken for granted.
The Museu Afro Brasil is visited by a high number of school

DISCUSSION 2 “ How do we develop professional skills in biennales and triennales?”Thiago de Paula Souza (Member of 10th Berlin Biennale curatorial team / Curator / Educator)

children coming from low-income districts; some of the children
would be visiting our museum for the first time. That made our work
very complicated because, although we had a lot to tell and share when
the children arrived at the museum, most of them would treat themuseum as kind of a church or a cathedral. The way they deal withthe building designed by the Brazilian modernist Oscar Niemeyer
would be very problematic. They would not be feeling comfortable
inside. So our work starts right at that moment, trying to figure out
how they could feel more comfortable in this space and decolonize
their bodies, because they should not feel uncomfortable. We would
devise something simple, like having the children lie down on thefloor to get closer to the artwork to make them feel comfortable andcreate some kind of idea of belonging.
It took a lot of energy to discuss stereotypes and concern for
the idea of beauty, too. For example, although half of the Brazilian
population is black, if you watch the Brazilian television, you would
think that you are somewhere in Sweden or elsewhere. You would
never realize that you are in Brazil. So itʼs important to somehow
bring other references and pictures of non-Western persons andnon-Western idea of beauty. We also have a section that is related to
the South American heritage and the native communities. Itʼs very
complicated to use the terms “indigenous” or “natives” because they
are just people. We are still trying to find the right Portuguese word
or an expression that would refer to this group of people. One of
the aims of the museum is to bring some kind of discussions on not
only about the African American presence, but also on the presenceof the native community, to break the idea that South American
native tradition was somehow less important or less complex than theWestern traditions.
Back then, I was working as an educator in the museum, whileworking as a curator in some independent spaces. “Independent”

is never the right word because we always depend on someone.
I would say “autonomous” space. The museum is quite big andalthough it oﬀers an interesting platform to reorganize our thinking,itʼs a public institution and public institutions in Brazil change very
slowly. I would say that the educational department, or the mediation
department, can bring more changes because educators are the ones
that connect to the public programs and bring fresh ideas. Probably
it is the same with the public institutions in your countries. Theychange very slowly and their movement is very small.
I was never trained as a curator. I was trained as a social scientist
and anthropologist but I have always been connected to education.
With my interest in anthropology, I started to research on SouthAmerican tradition and ended up being connected to contemporary
art. I got very interested in contemporary art and started to organize
small exhibitions and small workshops with artists in São Paulo.
That was the moment when Gabi Ngcobo, the head curator of the10th Berlin Biennale got to know my work. She saw some of my
exhibitions and workshops in São Paulo and she joined my tour inthe Museu Afro Brasil. So she got familiar with my work and we went
together to Accra in Ghana. Jochen Volz, who was the head curator of
the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, also joined us with some of the artists
from the exhibition. This trip to Accra was part of the research forthe public program of the São Paulo Biennial in which we were toresearch the black presence in Brazil. The colonial ghost still haunts
us. After working together with Gabi Ngcobo for a couple of months,
I collaborated with her on her publication that was released after the
opening of the biennial and joined some of their workshops. Afterthen, she invited me to join the curatorial team in Berlin. Right now,
I cannot say much about Berlin, but all of us are trying to look into
the collective madness that the contemporary world is facing today.

DISCUSSION 2 “ How do we develop professional skills in biennales and triennales?”99Biennial Organizations
Hoashi｜Thank you. We first had the presentation about Istanbul

followed by Kochi, which touched on their organizational development.
Thiago, with some experiences as educator, has brought in his voice
as a researcher and curator.
The curatorial team at Yokohama consists of museum-aﬃliatedcurators and freelance curators and coordinators, which means that
we combine the conservative museum culture and frenzy biennial
culture in one organization. It was interesting to hear both Riyas
and Bige mention the terms, “crisis management” and “taking
risks”. They seem to be a common vocabulary among our biennial
colleagues.
Could I first ask Sally Tallant about some of your ideas on teambuilding or organizational sustainability?
Sally Tallant [Tallant]｜I think biennials are inherently unstable but
need certain structure in order to create the stability that allows you
to take the risks. We also have a small team to organize the Liverpool
Biennial. I think education is the playground of the museums; itʼs
the future of the museum. I think that perhaps biennials can bring a
provocation into the context of the museum. Itʼs actually challenging
for curators who work in museum contexts to work at our scale, at
our pace and to embrace maybe 40 or 50 commissions at the sametime. They would usually have, for example, four years to work on
an exhibition with two artists. Itʼs good for them to embrace theunknowns and knowns in the way we have to in our biennials.
Biennials are not buildings and they are not collections. They arepeople. We invest a lot of time and energy in creating opportunities
for our staﬀ to travel. For example, we collaborate with Istanbul andalso with Kochi, in order for our staﬀ to have the capacity to grow,both within the organization but within others.
Because we are people-based, and not building-based, we change
a lot and we embrace the changing nature of our teams.
Judith Greer [Greer]｜I represent the Sharjah Art Foundation thatorganizes the Sharjah Biennial. Iʼd like to refer to Kochiʼs case about
starting out as a biennial and finding a need to have some kind ofsustainability. The biennial as a format became problematic in a
number of ways; one being that with each edition you would needto build a new team, train each person and at the end they would go
oﬀ to another challenge. The next time, you have to start over again.
The Sharjah Art Foundation was founded in 2009, but thebiennial had been in existence since 1993. Another of the motivations
for shifting to a year-round institutional model was that the Sharjah
Biennial had been trying to fill many of the “gaps” in a region that had
few museums and few institutions, and very little art infrastructure.
At the time, the Biennial was trying to do residencies, trying to help
artistsʼ production, trying to do conferences, etc. Trying to do all these“necessary” activities became something of a burden, and in many
ways impinged upon the biennialʼs freedom to become the arena ofexperimentation that really needs to inform its direction.
So, then we initiated what looks like the type structure Kochiʼsheading towards: a year-round institution where we can continue to100

do the biennial as a biennial, but also have a solid infrastructure that
we can rely upon, so we donʼt have to recreate the team each time.
And I think thatʼs probably the same with Istanbul ̶ youʼve got thefoundation that has all those infrastructural aspects ̶ so then thecreative side can be brought in and flourish without being burdenedby those needs.
Tallant ｜ Most biennials work year-round, but you donʼt do

exhibitions all year round. I think most biennials now have started to
produce works year-round and follow a model that has engagement
and education components. We do year-round programs andcommission work year-round.
Nevenka Šivavec｜We have a similar situation as Yokohama. We
have a museum and a biennial, but the biennial came first. The
biennial was established in 1955. At that time, it was part of theMuseum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, Moderna galerija. In 1986,
MGLC (International Centre of Graphic Arts) took over and became themain producer of the biennial. One of the problems was that thebiennial was printmaking-based; so it was media-based. After 2000,
with all the curatorial turns, it became necessary to gradually change
the format. So now we have a situation where the biennial is curated
and we try to find a new format for every new edition.
But we are facing some problems with our staﬀ because our mainstaﬀ working in the museum with the collection is the same staﬀ
working for the new productions for the biennial. We always recruit agroup of new people for the biennial, but itʼs always extremely diﬃcult
to start with a new group for the new biennial. We are also somehow“exploiting” young working force as we are not able to employ themfor two biennials in a row. So now we are working intensively to solve
this problem with the help of the state and the city. We are mainly
financed by the city and by the state, following the model of oursocialist past, when culture was 100% state-funded and financed.

Sally Tallant (Director, Liverpool Biennial)

DISCUSSION 2 “ How do we develop professional skills in biennales and triennales?”Professional Training and Biennial Skills

will not able to provide them a permanent solution because there arebigger problems around art.

Hoashi ｜ I think we are also concerned with exploiting young

professionals. We have a lot of motivated young people coming in,
but after one or two biennials they do get exhausted. We want themto move onto the next stage, but itʼs very diﬃcult to follow up. Is thenext step to become a permanent staﬀ? How are you trying to solve
thrs problem with your organization?
Komu｜I think itʼs one of the major issues in the art world in general.

An art institution in India may be producing, from our roughcalculation, more than 2,000 artists from all across the country, butmaybe 0.5% survives as an artist.
Forget about the biennial administration or running an eventor even management or those particular aspects in relation to art,
especially with contemporary art. The entire system is not able toaccommodate or facilitate or provide survival means or patronize theartists you have produced every year. Some of them move away fromart anyways. Someone whoʼs a painter would become a set designer or
animation artist. So if you take the art as a kind of a large umbrella,
the state or the social structure would not be able to accommodate
them all. India is a good example. Thatʼs something we have studied
through the studentʼs biennial exercise and the national surveythat we do with the curators who travel to the art institutions tounderstand the syllabus problem: how old the syllabus is; what kindof infrastructure they have; how technology is used; and what kindof old medium is used.
So we, as an organization run by artists, are actually in between
these big complexities. The biennial volunteers come for maybe 4
to 6 months to work in our organization but they have another six
months left. Where do they find job? So far, in our experience, theyknow how to tackle this problem. So their job is a temporary thing ora learning exercise. Many of them have gone into further studies andorganizations which deal with art in some way. We, as an organization,

Nevenka Šivavec (Director, Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts / Director, International
Centre of Graphic Arts)

Hoashi ｜ In biennial organizations, we need curatorial skills,
technical and production skills, educations skills, and so on. We first
had one-oﬀ education programs, but since 2014, we have a more
full scale education with professional staﬀ, which is very importantin terms of audience and volunteer development. How have you
developed your technical team? How long are they hired for? Are theyquite permanent?
Komu｜I think that most of the organizations have a permanent

team.
Greer｜Weʼve had technicians whoʼve worked with the biennial

and the foundation since the beginning, so they have a great
deal of experience. We even share our technical teams with otherorganizations. For example, we have done some training for otherbiennials and projects because our team members are such experts. We
also send our teams to look at exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale,
documenta and Münster Sculpture Project. They travel every year
to look at what technologies are being developed and at what otherpeople are implementing for their installation designs. We do a lotof staﬀ training actually across all departments. The foundation has
about 200 staﬀ now. Iʼm not sure how many in the technical teamalone, but there are at least 10 or 15 members. We also have anarchitectural team. Itʼs important to train people to share resources
and to send them to see what other people are doing because thatʼs
one of the best ways for people to learn, not only for the young staﬀ,
but also for the experienced staﬀ, because things change.
Komu｜We spoke with one of the staﬀ of Sharjah who does thelighting for the biennial. He came down to Kochi in 2012. He helped
us for 4-5 days while he was there. I still remember the good thing

Judith Greer (Director of International Programmes, Sharjah Art Foundation)

DISCUSSION 2 “ How do we develop professional skills in biennales and triennales?”101he said about the organization; he said that the Sharjah team goesand seeks the best advanced technical resources which are available
in the market at that time. It helps the artists to work better. Whenit comes to technical training, I think with countries like Japan, andeven Middle East, because it always goes for the best approaches. Itʼllbe good to share the technical resources.
Hoashi｜Here in Japan, we often hire technical tasks to production
companies. Some work with us as if they are part of our team.
Komu｜We also hire out. We have an agency based in Kochi that sets

audiovisuals up. But we hired one person last year who used to workfor the Venice Film Festival and is an expert on Dolby. So we hired
him because the curator suggested that heʼs the best person available.
Heʼs based in Bombay. Heʼs becoming a permanent feature, so heʼscoming back next year.
Tallant｜There may be one thing that distinguishes biennials. We

have had a production in international projects but we are in all of ourcuratorial meetings as well as our education meetings. We donʼt makeany distinctions among educators, curators, and producers because
the conversation is about facilitating the work. I think what happensin museums is departmentalization of that work.
So actually when an artist says “I want to make this,” whether
thatʼs possible is actually dependent on our head of production,
who probably know better than anyone else whatʼs possible.
Actually in some cases, though that would be seen as the curatorial
work. So we have a collective brain that can draw on all of thoseskills. I think museums struggle to understand what educators andproducers bring to the curatorial conversation. Biennials donʼt havethe departmentalization and the hierarchies you have in museum
institutions. Itʼs a joint endeavor.
Hoashi｜I wonder if there are any more questions.
Observer 1｜Thank you for your presentation and discussion. I
work for the Yokohama Paratriennale. In Kochi, you mentioned thatyou were able to re-develop the social infrastructure through yourbiennial. Can you elaborate on that?
Komu｜One of the main points in that particular aspect is that you

re-ascertaining the way of living together. So in that context, I said it
has contributed socially in empowering society.
Observer 2｜I work as a staﬀ at Saitama Triennale and also a
researcher in a university. In Japan, there are many art festivals, but
typically they form a team for one edition and the team is dissolved
after the edition closes. Those staﬀ can find work in other biennials
and festivals, but it is diﬃcult to develop and advance in their careers.
Örer｜I think we are facing the same problem everywhere. What weare trying to do is to also collaborate with other institutions. We try
to give recommendations and also some of them would like to go
abroad either for training or for educational purposes. So we try toalso support and facilitate the process as much as possible. If theyʼreavailable for the next edition of the biennial, we give the priority to
the members who have worked in the previous biennials. We may notable to have them as full-time staﬀ but we try to keep working withthem in other events of the foundation.
Greer｜At the Sharjah Art Foundation, the biennial becomes away for us to train people and find those who actually fit in ourorganization. Because we are a growing organization, we often
recruit from biennials, but also from other places. For example, we
now have a former head of marketing from iSKV in Istanbul since
she has moved to the UAE for personal reasons. We share a lot of
resources because in the UAE, in general, thereʼs a growing cultural
infrastructure. A lot of people who we train go on to, work at new
institutions, or at commercial galleries or go oﬀ to do PhDs or Masters
degrees because theyʼve become excited about the potential of careers
in this field.
Tallant｜One last thing. One thing we do is secondments. We takepeople out of museums and who work in galleries. So we are part ofan ecology, not just in the UK, but internationally, and those people
coming to us may acquire more international experience than theymight have in their organizations. So they can scale up and expand on
what they know. It means that we can take them out for a temporary
period and then send them back transformed.
Hoashi｜Thank you everybody for your contributions.

have to juxtapose whatʼs happening in the country right now, andthen the role of art; not just the role of the biennial, but the role ofart. So regarding the true production of art, Kochi as an organization,
has been able to emphasize the values of being diverse and supporting
multi-culturalism. Slowly these values turn into a platform to educate
people about the importance of living happily, of having a very goodneighbor, and having a good argument to move forward. In that
context, the biennial, in the last six years of organizing three editions,have empowered the society in understanding their own legacy, theirown history and, moreover, the power of living together. Within the
4 square-kilometer area where the biennial takes place, there are 30
communities speaking 16 languages living together. When thereʼs astrong idea of polarizing societies, the biennial becomes a catalyst in
102

DISCUSSION 2 “ How do we develop professional skills in biennales and triennales?”Discussion Summary
Discussion 1 “ Why Biennales and Triennales? New

Discussion 2 “ How do we develop professional skills

In this discussion, we had the opportunity to reconfirm the diversityof biennials, reexamine how they are different from museum
activities, and why they exist in the way they do. While biennials are
significant in the way they are able to seize the moment and respondto a range of situations in a timely manner, including crises andemergencies caused by natural disasters and political events, they
become, as a recurring exhibition, institutions with the duration oftime. These two contesting temporalities, temporary and durational,
epitomize biennials as a format. As for why we make biennials, it
was made clear that biennials are not organized for the competing
objectives sought after by the citizens, the art practitioners, and theoﬃcial sponsors, nor for demonstrating the opposing rationales
between the local and the global. Biennials are recurrent they and,
therefore, are able “to measure the change” through their repetitions.
In other words, biennials are held in order to measure the change thatsurrounds our public and society.
Biennials, from an economic standpoint, could be better value
for money than museums, which often need to spend most of their
turnover for maintenance of the facility and supporting the staﬀ,
rather than for art and education. Biennials are exempt from suchfinancial burden and are much freer. Also, while biennials are required
to respond to social change quicker and take risks in experimenting
with new forms, their inherent quality of immediate responsivenessis something that distinguishes them from museum activities.
Furthermore, a strong point was made on keeping biennials free fromall other interests, or at least making eﬀorts to do so, as independence
would guarantee freedom of expression in biennials.
Through the discussions with my colleagues, I was able to realize
how we need to hold a strong vision and belief in keeping the biennials
as a free and independent space for the public and society, while
understanding the diﬀerent objectives and backgrounds that support
each biennial. I was reassured that our future will be constructed
through such convictions of the biennial organizers.

It has been a while since professional development in biennials/
triennials/festivals has become a pending issue in Japan, but I have yetto have found any solutions or prospects in this regard. But gatheringwith my colleagues for this discussion, I found out that while they also
share the same issues, they have a better grasp of the unique capacities
necessary in working in biennials and understood where to direct ourfrustration.
So, what are the unique capacities necessary in working inbiennials? For example, a museum curator could take years to researchon artists and artworks before organizing an exhibition, but a biennial
curator would be required to negotiate with a number of artists inmuch shorter period, while also commissioning new works to beinstalled in time for the opening. The negotiations with not only theartists but also with diﬀerent stakeholders could continue until thelast minute, requiring the curator to take risks.
Under such conditions, any professionals joining the biennial
team would not only require certain professional skills, but more so
the capabilities to be flexible and the capacity to manage crises. Manybiennial organizations are based on small and agile teams, where thestaﬀ are multitasking and overlapping with their responsibilities incuration, education, production, public relations, and so on, unlike
museums which are departmentalized. The museum organizations
could be described as building-based culture and biennialorganizations as people-based culture.
There were many voices which validated that biennials aretraining grounds for arts administrators to build their capacities on
the ground. In the meanwhile, there were a few voices that raised
concerns for exploiting young professionals.
As much as the need for flexibility in organizations was stressedin our discussion, the need for building an organization withpermanent staﬀ for long term sustainability of biennials was also
understood.
Finally, as I listened to the experience of the young Brazilian
curator working for the Berlin Biennale and episode of the biennialstaﬀ exchange between Liverpool and Istanbul, I was struck by howbiennial professionals in other countries are crossing borders andbuilding capacities as a matter of fact. I imagined that it is only when
we have our Japanese professionals joining the loop that we can claim
to be truly international in our outlook as organizers of international
exhibitions and festivals.

challenges, models and strategies ”

Iida Shihoko

in biennales and triennales? ”

Hoashi Aki

Discussion Summary103

Yokohama Triennale 2017

IBA（国際International Seminar

IBA、45 以上“CONNECTIVITY
AS A

目

、世界各国

国際
創造、知識
目

蓄積

、文化芸術

会員

関

構成

目的 掲
関係者

活動

各種活動 発展

、芸術

、広 共有

。二

関係者 水平型、戦略、方法論、
場 提供

提示 、
目的

。

About the IBA (International Biennial Association)
IBA is an international network of biennials consisting of morethan 120 members of biennials from more than 45 countries. Its
main objectives are twofold: first, to expand and share activities ofcuratorial, artistic creation and knowledge through cooperation andexchange among biennials around the world; Second, to createa horizontal network within the broader biennial world to develop

2017 国際

further the cultural and artistic production and to create a space

国際展・芸術祭」

for communication, cooperation and information exchange by
providing strategies, methodologies and vision.

発行日： 2018 年 3 月
委託：文化庁（東京都千代田区霞 関三丁目 2 番 2 号）
受託：( 株）NHK

。一

協力 、

創出強化

、協力、情報交換発

Triennales”
Report（東京都渋谷区神山町 5-5NR

編集：横浜

組織委員会（神奈川県横浜市西区

協力： IBA（国際協会）

翻訳： 株式会社

・

）

、横浜

3-4-1 横浜美術館内）

組織委員会： 津山 勇印刷・製本： 株式会社栄光舎

Date of publication: March 2018
Commissioned by: Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan (3-2-2 Kasumigaseki,
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo)

Administrative Agent: NHK Promotions INC (NR building, 5-5 Kamiyama-cho, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo)
Edited by: Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale (c/o Yokohama Museum of Art, 3-4-1,
Minatomirai, Nishi-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa)

Cooperation by: IBA (International Biennial Association)
Translation: Ten Nine Communications, Inc., Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale
Design: TSUYAMA Isamu
Printed by: Eikosha Corporation© Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan, 2018
Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale, 2018 All rights reserved.
禁無断転載

、二

、

METHOD?
The Future of
Biennales and

「接続
記録集

協会）

国 120 名以上