The Study of
Curatorial Culture
Curatorial Culture
ISSUE 17 2026
Accelerationist Biennialism and Its Discontents
Accelerationist Biennialism and Its Discontents
Accelerationist Biennialism and Its Discontents
We can only be satisfied, therefore, if we assert that the process of
civilization is a modification which the vital process experiences
under the influence of a task that is set it by
Eros and instigated by Ananke—by the exigencies of reality.
— Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents1
Since the inauguration of the Venice Biennale in 1895, the biennial has evolved from a singular exhibition into an omnipresent global exhibitionary complex.2 Its proliferation accelerated markedly with the expansion of rapid globalization and the geopolitical shifts that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, with more than 200 biennials of varying scales worldwide, one might observe that a biennial opens somewhere almost every other day. What can be termed accelerationist biennialism describes not only the exponential increase in the number of biennials, but also the intensification of their temporal, institutional, and discursive demands, particularly in relation to the deployment of cultural economic power. In this sense, the term accelerationist resonates not only with the disastrous consequences of the Anthropocene, but also with the political ideologies usually associated with either the left or the right.3 The great acceleration of biennials, from fewer than five such exhibitions before the 1960s to their present ubiquity during the past 40 years, has produced an arbitrary assumption: that large scale, periodic exhibitions can function as engines of artistic internationalization, catalysts for local art systems, and instruments of the cultural economy, including tourism, market valuation, collections, and intercity diplomacy. Precisely because they are not held annually, biennials tend toward expansion in exhibiting fields and venues, often exceeding the framework of the museum exhibition while also differentiating themselves from art fairs, which treat artworks more directly as commodities. Although generally conceived in resistance to such practices, the institution of biennials can still become what Martin Heidegger identified as Kunstbetrieb, the “art business,” in which the work of art is subsumed within the operational logic of exhibition making for the public. Heidegger noted, “as soon as the thrust into the extraordinary is parried and captured by the sphere of familiarity and connoisseurship, the art business has begun.”4 The art business that is usually associated with biennials does not automatically grant “the truth that happens by the work itself,” as the aesthetic experience of the beholder and serving as the bearer through which truth is disclosed to the individual.
Just as civilization impedes the fulfillment of desire and, consequently, ordains its discontents, as Sigmund Freud argued in 1937, the historical development of biennial culture likewise generates its own discontents, ranging from idiosyncratic curatorial disagreements to structural symptoms embedded within exhibition making itself, dependent on the attributions of different organizations. These discontinuous incidents cannot be exhaustively accounted for, and the list can only go on and on: the infamous dispute in 1972 between curator Harald Szeemann and participating artists such as Daniel Buren, Joseph Kosuth, and the collective Art & Language; the conflicts surrounding documenta 15, where ruangrupa’s lumbung clashed with German cultural policy amid accusations of antisemitism; in Taiwan, the frictions between local and international cocurators; and the asymmetrical translation in Turkish, Chinese, and English of exhibition titles displayed in the Istanbul Biennial. In short, the biennial is a mega exhibition we love to hate, and perhaps hesitate to love. Strangely speaking, these discontents are seldom directed toward the appreciation of certain artworks, namely the aesthetic experience, but rather toward the operational and institutional conditions of art, its administration, the art business, or even curators themselves.
1 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (Norton & Company, 1961) 49.
2 Tony Bennett, “The Exhibtionary Complex,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (Routledge, 1996) 82.
3 Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015) 23.
4 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) 66.
The Genealogy of Biennials and After
The origins of the biennial business can be traced to its inauguration in Venice in 1895. The exhibition, named the International Art Exhibition of the City of Venice, was partly due to the gradual decline of the Venice harbor, continuing the legacy of trade fairs and extending them toward the circulation of artworks as commodities.5 In this sense, the Venice Biennale was never simply an artistic initiative, but from the outset was embedded within the economic logic of exchange, display, and value production that is part of transnational capitalism. The then mayor, Riccardo Selvatico, proposed the idea in 1893, and it took place two years later in the Giardini gardens, where the Pro Arte Pavilion was built, featuring artworks from 16 European countries, fostering art markets and collections, and attracting more than 200,000 visitors. From its inception, with its two-year interval, the Biennale could function as a site where art, market, and empire intersected, positioning Venice as a renewed node shifting between economic and cultural capitals. The biennial soon developed into a system of national pavilions, as countries constructed their own spaces. Belgium was the first in 1907, followed by Hungary, Germany, England, France, and Russia. Functioning much like the world expositions, particularly the 1851 Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, the Venice Biennale came to be recognized as an “Olympics of art,” where internationalism was staged through national representation. Yet this internationalism could only be Eurocentric, and operated through competitive displays of national identity, cultural prestige, and imperial ambition, prefiguring a geopolitical logic in which global visibility was structured through the bounded form of the nation-state in the midst of the two World Wars. The 1930 Venice Biennale marked a decisive shift, as management was transferred from municipal authority to a national institution. With the rise of the fascist regime, Adolf Hitler met Benito Mussolini in Venice and, dissatisfied with the German Pavilion, later oversaw its reconstruction in a neo-Renaissance fascist style and mounted the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition five years later. Hans Haacke’s project Germania (1992) commented on the traffic of fascism and the institution of the Biennale, exposing the historical layering of German nationality and symbolic cultural power through his installation. Cultural production thus becomes inseparable from political forces, and the genealogy of the Venice Biennale reveals an entanglement in which nationalism became particularly visible under fascism.
To think the biennial industry alongside the world exposition is to recognize its deeper historical lineage in the fairs organized by European merchants at regular intervals during the Middle Ages, culminating in the “Great Exhibition” held at the Crystal Palace in 1851. At a moment when the British Empire stood at its height, the exhibition was staged to display the achievements of the Industrial Revolution, presenting industrial production as both national triumph and imperial spectacle. With Queen Victoria extending invitations to nations across the world, internationalism was already framed within a structure of competition, hierarchy, and display, in which the empire organized the terms of global visibility. In the postwar period, however, documenta, founded in 1955 by Arnold Bode, marked a different but related moment in the history of biennialization. A designer and teacher at the Werkakademie in Kassel, Bode conceived and designed the exhibition in working with the Federal Garden Show (Bundesgartenschau), envisioning it as a “museum of 100 days” that would reconnect German art with the international modern art scene, framed as “internationalism of modern art.” Documenta thus became part of a broader process of recognizing national rootedness and reestablishing the role of history and tradition, with expressionist and abstract art positioned at its ideological center.With a majority participation of German artists, and under the conditions of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War, documenta sought to remap “twentieth-century art” (Kunst des XX. Jahrhunderts) by resituating the interrupted history of German modernism, particularly Expressionism and abstract art, as an authentic lineage capable of linking art beyond the divisions of the Iron Curtain. Seen from this perspective, the biennial business does not emerge as an isolated cultural form, but as a continuation of this exhibitionary logic. It becomes a site where internationalism and nationalism confront one another, a contested space in which artistic display, ideological power, political authority of colonialism and imperialism, and cultural-economic interests converge. The contested site may be understood in relation to the original meaning of exposition, wherein the artwork is exposed to the public, recalling the Roman practice of expositio, in which the life of the unwanted infant was placed in a public space, subject to adoption, enslavement, or death.6
The Use and Abuse of Curatorial Institutionalism
Especially with the proliferation of biennials since the 1990s, the global phenomenon of accelerationist biennialism, on the one hand, continues to give the impression that the biennial is the cutting edge exhibitionary complex outside museum collections and art fairs. On the other hand, biennial curatorial practice aims to address the problematics of the apparatus of biennial making. Following the legacy of Harald Szeemann and Walter Hopps, curators bring conceptual frameworks and veritable considerations beyond sheer exhibition making or the display of artworks, introducing philosophical and aesthetic ideas into curatorial work rather than the art historical considerations most associated with museum exhibitions. From independent curating, often associated with notions of criticality and performativity, the new institutionalism of curating dwells on reflexivity and self critique of the institution of art and exhibition, responding to the problematics of biennial making. Curatorial institutionalism thus sustains the hope that each new biennial might reinvent itself like a phoenix rebirth, even as controversies, protests, scandals, and disputes remain part of business as usual in biennial operations. Yet, at the same time, the critique of curatorial institutions has itself become institutionalized. That is to say, the transgression of the biennial’s white cube can no longer be seen as a threat or subversion to its existence. On the contrary, biennials often welcome such transgression and provocation as part of their own operation. The termination of Manifesta 6, for instance, did not end the franchise of Manifesta, but instead contributed to its branding as a cutting edge experimental platform. A similar example can be found in the 2008 São Paulo Biennial, where an entire floor of the exhibition space was deliberately left empty so that the exhibition could function as a public arena for events. These seemingly critical stances of curatorial practice, rather than negating the biennial, are subsumed within its conditions of production. The risk inevitably remains that whatever radical intervention against institutional hegemony may be attempted, it may yet be appropriated, and thus rendered critically ineffectual.
The paradoxical use of new institutionalism appears as a symptom of capitalism: it is easier to envisage the end of history than to imagine the end of capitalism itself. In this sense, curatorial institutionalism does not stand outside the system it seeks to critique, but is already conditioned by it. The irony of curatorial institutionalism is that the more transgression and profanation are enacted upon the biennial, the more biennials proliferate and the exhibition complex is further enhanced. What presents itself as critique often functions as renewal, generating new forms of visibility, discourse, and institutional legitimacy. The end of the biennial cannot be easily imagined; instead, critique becomes a productive force within its expansion, continuously feeding the very structure it seeks to challenge. In this sense, curatorial institutionalism risks becoming standardized and reabsorbed into the capitalist logic of the biennial industry, much as Theodor Adorno warned in his critique of the cultural industry, where opposition is transformed into cultural value and circulation.
However, new institutionalism does not entirely collapse into this logic. Its critical potential persists precisely in its instability, in its refusal to become fully fixed as an institution. It continues to introduce alternative curatorial apparatuses into the biennial structure, opening spaces that cannot be easily governed by the dominant logic of production and accumulation. documenta 15 offers one such example. The collective ruangrupa introduced the curatorial framework of lumbung to foster new forms of artistic community grounded in sharing, collectivity, and resource redistribution, resisting reabsorption into the institutionalization of critique. Rather than producing critique as a symbolic gesture, their practice attempted to reorganize the very conditions of exhibition making. As the first Asian curatorial collective to direct documenta, their approach also expanded the scope of internationalism once defined by Arnold Bode, mapping territories of contemporary art that had remained unrecognized within twentieth century exhibition histories. In doing so, it gestures toward a limit point of biennial capitalism, where curatorial practice no longer merely reflects or critiques the system, but begins to intervene in its operational logic, even if such intervention can never be fully secured or remain outside the risk of subsumption.
5 Panos Kompatsiaris, The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials: Spectacles of Critique, Art and Theory (Routledge, 2017) 23.
6 Jean-Louis Déotte, Pierre-Damien Huyghe, Le Jeu De L’exposition (L’ Harmattan, 1998), 90.
Accelerationist Biennialism in Taiwan
Accelerationist biennialism in Taiwan can be traced back to the 1998 Taipei Biennial, curated by Fumio Nanjo under the directorship of Lin Mun-lee at the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts, marking an official declaration of the internationalization of Taiwanese art.7 Since then, Taiwan, like many other countries across Asia, for example Singapore, Shanghai, Jakarta, and Bangkok, has witnessed a rapid proliferation of biennials. Major museums now host their own biennials, ranging from contemporary art to printmaking and documentary film. With around twenty biennials appearing and disappearing over time, Taiwan has become part of this broader wave of accelerationist biennialism. The recent development of the Tainan Art Museum hosting the Tainan Biennial is yet another chapter in this ongoing expansion, in which the biennial format is often adopted as a presumed vehicle of internationalization and qualification, without adequately addressing the necessity of making a biennial itself. In this sense, the instrumentalization of the biennial becomes evident, with only a few exceptions that attempt to sustain a more reflexive curatorial practice.
Moreover, one distinctive characteristic of biennials in Taiwan is that they are largely led by public museums, rather than being organized through foundations or other governmental sectors such as tourism, as in the case of the Lyon Biennial. In the Taipei Biennial, political themes are often framed through artistic globalization and the discourse of the Anthropocene. In earlier editions, such as those in 2008 and 2010, new institutionalism played a central role, and discursive practices were integral to the exhibition-making process. However, in more recent editions, such as Small World and Whispers on the Horizon, this discursive tendency has become less pronounced. When thematic discourse recedes, museum-led biennials risk resembling art fairs, lacking a unified conceptual framework and relying instead on diffuse poetic language. As the reflexive stance of biennial making becomes diminished, even as the number of biennials in Taiwan continues to increase, the accelerationist beinnialism in Taiwan must once again be critically addressed.
In particular, in the recent edition of the Taipei Biennial (2024), curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, directors of Hamburger Bahnhof—National Gallery of Contemporary Art in Berlin, the character of a museum-led biennial and its institutional ties is even more pronounced. While the curatorial statement articulated a need to reconstruct the historical contingency of Taiwanese art and culture through the concept of “yearning,” the two curators lacked a self-reflexive point of view regarding the necessity of engaging with local history as constructed from the perspective of cultural outsiders. Instead, the exhibition tends to reaffirm the authority of constructing history through a dominant external gaze of curatorial authorship. Moreover, certain cultural observations, such as their claim of “three objects—a puppet, a diary, and a bicycle,” further reinforce a quasi-colonial anthropological approach that treats local ethnographic objects as curatorial discoveries rather than as cultural agents within the Taiwanese cultural field.8 At the same time, the incorporation of museum collections alongside invited artworks in a largely juxtaposed manner allows formal and literal impressions to dominate over curatorial concepts. This literal fetishistic appropriation from the museum archive not only reveals an undertone of cultural exoticism and stereotyping, but also exposes the limitations of a museum-led biennial framework, in which guest curators risk functioning as external observers searching for host cultural particularities, much in line with colonial patterns embedded within the genealogy of biennials, without situating the position of the curator himself in perspective.
Toward the Transvaluation of Accelerationist Biennialism
Accelerationist biennialism, when critically examined, can be understood as operating along both left and right tendencies. On the one hand, the uncritical multiplication of biennials, driven by the desire and yearning for international recognition and cultural economic growth, aligns with a more instrumental, right wing cultural logic. On the other hand, practices of institutional critique and new institutionalism retain a left oriented impulse, seeking to transform the structures of exhibition making. Yet this produces a dilemma: critique itself is often absorbed by the very institutions it seeks to challenge, and intervention can never be fully secured, remaining at risk of subsumption within the value system of global capitalism first established in Venice 130 years ago.
Under such conditions, while risking intellectual cynicism or cultural nihilism, biennial accelerationists on the left may nevertheless seek alternative strategies, even as transgressions, profanations, and critiques altogether circulate inertially within preexisting cultural, economic, and social value systems, oriented toward the speculative possibility of systemic implosion. Within this constraint, accelerationism does not entail the multiplication of biennials or the intensification of their spectacle, but rather the strategic amplification of their internal contradictions and conflicts, pushing the value system to begin to reconfigure beyond the point of reintegration into the existing exhibitionary industry. This position can be understood as a reversal of the negativity identified by Theodor Adorno in the cultural industry: rather than reproducing standardization, uniformity, and capitalization, it seeks to suspend and redirect these processes toward a condition of uncolonialization outside the territory of empire. Such a condition implies an extreme form of deterritorialization that transvalues the spatial relations of production, reconfigures the circuits of governance and capital, and rearticulates the economy in its most explicitly political dimension, even if it remains an unfulfilled failure, a necessary mark that cannot be subsumed back into the circuits of dispositif power, belonging to Eros and Ananke, the two goddesses of desire and force.
From this perspective, documenta 15 may be read as an articulation of this possible attempt, insofar as it resists subsumption and foregrounds transvaluation as a curatorial strategy, not as a guaranteed successful outcome, but as a continuous and situated curatorial practice in a Derridean pharmakon sense, to cure by rendering the patient unwell. The aforementioned Manifesta 6, the 2008 São Paulo Biennial, and the 2010 Taipei Biennial are likewise compelled to confront and potentially transvalue the very logics that sustain their institutional existence. Here, the transvaluation of the structural conditions of exhibition emerges as a curatorial strategy, usually not deemed a guaranteed success, but as a necessary and ongoing ambitious attempt to rethink and rework the ultra-left horizon of accelerationist biennialism, as the condition for imagining the end of the biennial otherwise.
7 Andrew Solomon, ART; As Asia Regroups Art Has a New Urgency, The New York Times, Aug.23, 1998, Mar. 24, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/23/arts/art-as-asia-regroups-art-has-a-new-urgency.html.
8 The 14th Taipei Biennial 2025 Announces its Theme Whispers on the Horizon and Artist Lineup|Press , Mar.20, 2025, Mar, 24, 2026, https://www.taipeibiennial.org/main/news_page.aspx?id=154.
1 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (Norton & Company, 1961) 49.
2 Tony Bennett, “The Exhibtionary Complex,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (Routledge, 1996) 82.
3 Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015) 23.
4 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) 66.
5 Panos Kompatsiaris, The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials: Spectacles of Critique, Art and Theory (Routledge, 2017) 23.
6Jean-Louis Déotte, Pierre-Damien Huyghe, Le Jeu De L’exposition (L’ Harmattan, 1998), 90.
7 Andrew Solomon, ART; As Asia Regroups Art Has a New Urgency, The New York Times, Aug.23, 1998, Mar. 24, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/23/arts/art-as-asia-regroups-art-has-a-new-urgency.html
8 The 14th Taipei Biennial 2025 Announces its Theme Whispers on the Horizon and Artist Lineup|Press , Mar.20, 2025, Mar, 24, 2026, https://www.taipeibiennial.org/main/news_page.aspx?id=154.
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Author
Hongjohn Lin is an artist, writer and curator. Graduated from New York University in Arts and Humanities with Ph.D. He has participated in exhibitions including Taipei Biennial(2004), the Asia Triennial Manchester 2008, the Rotterdam Film Festival 2008, and the 2012 Taipei Biennial, Guangzhou Triennial (2015), and China Asia Biennial (2014). Lin was curator of the Taiwan Pavilion Atopia, Venice Biennial 2007, co-curator of 2010 Taipei Biennial (with Tirdad Zolghadr), and numerous curatorial projects such as Taizhong’s The Good Place (2002) and Live Ammo (2012). Lin is serving as Professor at the Taipei National University of the Arts. For the past 10 years, he has been working on project based on George Psalmanazar, A fake Taiwanese in the early Enlightenment. He is interested in transdisciplinary arts, politics of aesthetics, and curating. His writings can be found in Artco magazine, Yishu magazine, international journals, and publications of Art as a Thinking Process (2010), Artistic Research (2012), Experimental Aesthetic(2014), Altering Archive: The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture (2017). He wrote the Introductions for Chinese edition of Art Power (Boris Groys) and Artificial Hells (Clair Bishop) . His books in Chinese include Poetics of Curating (2018), Beyond the Boundary: Interdisciplinary Arts in Taiwan, Writings on Locality, Curating Subjects: Practices of Contemporary Exhibitions.
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