Biennales etc:
the South Asian Experience

Kurchi Dasgupta

Kurchi Dasgupta calls for an open discussion on the need and fate of biennales and art fairs in this receding economy as she explores the Kathmandu International Art Festival and Colombo Art Biennale.

The world has enough biennales or biennials (about a hundred and fifty) and international art festivals yet new ones keep coming up almost every year. One wonders why, especially when its economy is still quite not back on its feet and therefore neither is the global art market. Does it mean that the biennales represent an ideal, utopian space where the market recedes and allows art production to commence unrestricted? That is apart from their role as the ‘most vital and visible site for the production, distribution, and public discourse on contemporary art today’ as proclaimed by the International Biennial Foundation. The Kathmandu International Art Festival (a biennial event now turned triennial) and the Colombo Art Biennale (CAB) stepped into the international circuit in 2009. The entry of these two new regional events comes as a bit of a surprise because the year embodied little economic respite or expectation. Was the organizers’ nonchalance a disavowal of common-sense economics?
Or was it a direct reflection of the fact that these events took root in nations lying at the periphery of the global economy and therefore felt the crunch second-hand as ripples in turbulent waters? Interestingly, both nations had just come out of crippling, long-drawn civil wars and both events were initiated by private gallerists in an effort to put the host cities on the global art map. Interesting, again, neither of them received any significant state support though the events were touted as national events and the two states would ultimately benefit in terms of enhanced cultural capital and hence, prestige. Not to mention the advantage of future economic gains through tourism etc. if nothing else. But disinterest at the government level has its own benefits though, allowing organizers and participants to evade implicit state-imposed restrictions to some extent and flirt with an element of resistance, however mild – even though such resistance would inevitably be limited and in ultimate alignment with the agenda of sponsoring entities which somehow always boils down to the globalizing hand of business.