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Dr. Charles Merewether

Amrita Gupta Singh writes on international Biennales and their ideological frameworks, based on a talk by Dr. Charles Merewether who was the Artistic Director and Curator of the 2006 Sydney Biennale and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Cross Cultural Research, Australian National University.

Due to large-scale economic, global, political, and socio-cultural change, and the momentum of the transference of concepts, currency, information and cross-cultural contacts around the globe, art practices has been radically transformed in our times. Issues of politics, economics, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, human rights, war or also local issues and engaging with these via the conceptual and aesthetic possibilities of art is one of the prominent attributes of contemporary art. This emphasis on politics, though not entirely new, does seem to have intensified. The trajectories of contemporary art is often directed by massive Biennales that propose to promote inter-cultural exchange or attempt to discover young and unknown artists or alternative art groups. Till date, numerous international Biennales/Triennials showcasing contemporary art have taken place around the world, an overwhelming majority of which began in the 1990s. This Biennale phenomenon is characterized by the inclusion of an increasing number of Asian artists and a mushrooming of biennale type exhibitions in the Asia-Pacific region. Due to this Biennale phenomenon, the critics say that the Biennales are becoming less of an arts issue and more of a cultural showcasing for the host country. One would ask whether the role of a biennale is to capture the zeitgeist, or to rebalance cultural power by focusing on the art of emergent regions/nations or the periphery as opposed to the Center/West. Should a Biennale be a survey of these periphery art worlds, should it be thematic, should it capture some aspects of contemporary cultural history, or should it represent a continuing dialogue between people and cultures? If inclusiveness is one of its key components, to what degree is this inclusiveness meant to be, and to what extent does it reshape contemporary art theory and cultural discourse? In a presentation in Mumbai, ‘Taking Place: Acts of Survival for a Time to Come’ organized collaboratively by the Mohile Parikh Center for the Visual Arts and the Biennale society, Delhi, Dr. Charles Merewether, a well-known art historian and curator, shared his views regarding the 2006 Sydney Biennale, which engaged with some of the queries stated above.