The Study of
Curatorial Culture
Curatorial Culture
ISSUE 17 2026
Accelerationist Biennialism and Its Discontents
Accelerationist Biennialism and Its Discontents
On The Margins of Biennialism
Today’s interest in biennials seems to be particularly focused on manifestations in imagination-triggering metropolitan environments such as Berlin, Shanghai, São Paulo, and Dakar. That does not mean, though, that contributions to the artistic discourse provided by perennials on locations elsewhere on the world map would be less important or even irrelevant. Quite the reverse, I would like to claim, events and manifestations in far-off corners of the (art) world seem to create a critical distance, enabling artistic reflection to be more authentic and palpable. Outside the blazing spotlights of the international art scene, a peripheral biennial or triennial is able to make sharp and sometimes even risky choices, because of which radical and complex perspectives can be articulated in a subtle and intellectual way. Precisely these biennials provide a cumulative counterpoint to the Venice Biennale’s universal template for the biennial as form and medium. They can therefore be seen as a potential space for the generation of a counter-discourse against the system of presumptive universality, which is globalized, but above all hegemonized. Because of this, these platforms make a structural contribution to the deconstruction of the contemporary visual arts “exhibitionary complex”1: an apparatus that understands biennials as signs of the event-based nature of the art world with a focus on the temporary and occasional. A similar, and profoundly striking, description can be found in Okwui Enwezor’s seminal essay “Mega-Exhibitions: The Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form”2: such non-centric biennials contrast the totalizing logic of spectacular capitalism with the potential of “multitude” as a resistance force.
Another problem many mega-biennials currently struggle with is the requirement for productive and interesting collaborations involving local partners and institutions. For the peripherally located biennials and their often natural form of being embedded in regional infrastructures, such an issue is entirely out of order. Just because of that embedded quality, small-scale biennials will meet the axiom once articulated by René Block: “Rather than a perfect exhibition, a biennial should become a workshop for contemporary art, something that could provide an opportunity for encounters between local and international artists that would encourage work and exchange. Beyond a spectacular, large-scale, international exhibition festival, making themselves the producers, educators, and hosts of discursive programs.”3 And with that, the question, “To Biennial or not To Biennial,” which was asked by the preliminary Bergen Assembly4, should be strategically reformulated as “What a Biennial yet can Be?” This question can be understood both institutionally and speculatively. How can we prevent, after a period of a “Biennial Decade” where the biennial was decisive in the presentation and reception of contemporary art, that these experimental formats and platforms are being absorbed back into a traditional museum show and thus become part of the general exhibitionary complex. Such institutionalization means that biennials become less and less able to engage with the challenges thrown up by the present and emerging realities. Thus, a more speculative dimension emerges: How can a biennial contribute to the political imaginary? How and in what format can a biennial contribute to articulating the following three questions: what is possible and impossible, visible and invisible, to be done and not to be done?
The model proposed by René Block seems to be based on the experimental practice introduced in Havana in the 1980s: making Cuba the fourth location in the world to host a biennial. It was a biennial that no longer focused on the Eurocentric model of the Venice Biennale, but which set itself another programmatic goal: to develop a different mode of exchange, namely to present the Global South. Hence, a discourse was developed that gave the first impetus to a postcolonial consciousness: the south as a zone of agency and creation that did not fit in the linear perspective of art historical thinking. Moreover, it was no longer thought in the centrist terms of a main exhibition. An organic whole of shows, events, meetings, workshops, panel discussions, publications, and outreach programs was placed opposite the provincialism of the center. By taking what was once just an exhibition and unraveling this format into an array of various sub-exhibitions, venues, and event formats, a biennial model was created that is still distinctive of today’s thinking about biennials.
The focal point of the first editions of the Havana Biennale was not placed on the spectacle as such, but rather on investigative and discursive interests. For example, the Biennale introduced a range of urgent issues and vocabularies at an early stage: nomadism, displacement, marginalization, cultural hybridization, ecology, and the periphery of postmodernity. And with that, the Havana Biennale was the beginning of what would later be described as the discursive turn in curating: a decisive step towards conceiving biennials as discursive environments, where the display of artworks is part of a much broader project of research and knowledge production.5
Could a contemporary biennial form be regenerated to capture the innovative energy and the inspiring impact that it had throughout the world during the 1990s, or will our understanding of biennials drift into the repetitions of institutionalization, the taming of difference, and the merge with other art world structures? To answer that question, it is necessary to invent a different, more topical exhibitionary structure, one that manifests more acutely the antinomies and predicaments of our present situation: its multiplicity, its layered contemporalities, and its proliferation of differences.
Over the past decade, this challenge seems to have been given a contemporary interpretation in the debate on the curatorial condition.6 A complementary, epistemological dimension is stressed here, including the possibility of activating various curatorial constituents, so that an investigative practice arises that enables propositions regarding other (political) imaginaries. It is precisely this dimension of “the curatorial” that generates new understandings, new perceptions, new constellations, and new aesthetic articulations through and about the world in which we live: in other words, new assemblages of world making. Consequently, that dimension provides a different approach to exhibitions. The exhibition becomes a transitory space (with works-in-constellation, works-in-context, works-in-relation, and works-in-action) for the negotiation of social, political, and ecological urgencies, where the practice of curating is understood as the agency from which new modes of knowledge emerge.
This expanded field of curating – where the exhibition operates as a form of critical analysis and inquiry – requires more topical characterizations such as research exhibition, essay exhibition, thought exhibition, or project exhibition. Claire Bishop notes in Information Overload7, that these exhibition genres are distinguished by text and discourse to support an abundance of (archival) materials usually presented horizontally and rhizomatically, in the form of showcases, shelves, tables, and archives. However, and it is important to emphasize this, such exhibition formats are conditioned by a processual character, an open-ended mode of becoming where the material is mobilized and the viewer is no longer a recipient but a co-researcher.
Several curators identify a clear oscillation in the dynamic of the exhibition as site for continuous research. For example, Anselm Franke describes the “essay exhibition” as a continuous interaction between meaning and material.8 Nick Aikens opts for the perspective of the “research exhibition,” which he understands as a push and pull between an analysis of world making (the onto-epistemic register, the epistemological promise) and the techniques of the exhibition (the exhibitionary apparatus, the operational register).9 In this continuum, clear resistance is expressed against the binary divisions that condition our perception and cognition of the world, ultimately resulting in a radically different perspective of the concept of truth.
The most important and most urgent curatorial challenge, however, is: How could a biennial question the hegemonic world system that globalization has created and, as Steven Madoff has argued10, contrast this with these new forms of contemplation? How could a biennial put an end to the instrumentalizing culture of festivalism and spectacularization and, despite today’s global economy with its continuous acceleration (a direct consequence of the quantitative information overload that characterizes the current mega-exhibitions), demand specific attention for slowing down and meaningful engagements?
1 Tony Bennett’s Foucauldian analysis of the cultural conditions of the emergence of the museum in the nineteenth century revealed the processes by which a universal concept of “man – the outcome of evolution” – came to be posited as the object, and subject of knowledge, to the exclusion of other discursive formations. (Tony Benett, The Birth of the Museum, London/New York: Routledge, 1995). Steven Madoff situates the topicality of Benett’s “exhibitionary complex” in An Enfolding: The Exhibitionary Complex and The Self, Critical Curating, 2025. Available at: https://www.thecuratorial.net/index/critical-curating/an-enfolding-madoff.
2 Okwui Enwezor, “Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form,” 2004. Reprinted in The Biennial Reader, ed. Elena Filipovic et al. (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 426-445.
3 René Block, “Foreword,” Catalogue 8th Sydney Biennale, The Readymade Boomerang, 1990.
4 Prior to the first Bergen Assembly 2012, an international conference took place in 2009 asking the following question: How to Biennial? This led to the following outline: “Bergen Assembly has the ambition of working prognostically, allowing newly emerging initiatives to be investigated in light of their future potential.” See at: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/38383/call-for-biennial-knowledge.
5 It was the perspective of epistemic response-ability linked to the troubled present that was further elaborated in the curatorial proposal Any Speculation Whatever (Exhibition, Screening, and Seminars) for the 14th Havana Biennale Future and Contemporaneity (November 12, 2021 – April 30, 2022), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana). A series of propositions (Participating artists: Femke Herregraven, Ursula Biemann, Lara Almarcegui, Irene Kopelman, Terike Haapoja, and Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan. Curator: Henk Slager) emerged which, in dialogue with local artists and audiences, could expand urgent planetary issues and concepts such as chronopolitics, non-linear time, care, climate change, ecopolitics, new modes of subjectivity, and other imaginaries related to the societal role and agency of contemporary art. These propositions focus on the capacity to bring those issues and concepts together, to abduct different modes of knowledges and insights, while melding them together into an instantiation of our contemporary conditions. These perspectives are further elaborated in various contributions (including Margarita Gonzalez Lorente and Henk Slager) in the publication Expo-Facto. Into the Algorithm of the Exhibition, eds. Henk Slager and Mick Wilson (Utrecht: Metropolis M Books, 2022).
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portal/announcement?announcement=1775230
6 Beatrice von Bismarck, The Curatorial Condition (London: Sternberg Press, 2022).
7 Claire Bishop, “Information Overload”, chapter in Disordered Attention:How We Look at Art and Performance Today, London: Verso, 2024. Prepublication in Artforum: Information Overload: On the superabundance of research-based art: https://www.artforum.com/features/claire-bishop-on-the-superabundance-of-research-based-art-252571/.
8 Anselm Franke, “Notes on the Research-Based Exhibitions,” in Exhibition Matters, GAM 14, Milicia Tomic and Dubravska Sekulic (eds.), 2018, 144-147. A striking example of this essayistic form is the curatorial project Modern Monsters by Anselm Franke, 8th Taipei Biennial, 2012. https://universes.art/en/taipei-biennial/2012.
9 Nick Aikens, “Approaching Research-Exhibition Practices,” in Vector: Critical Research in Context, issue: Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination, Iasi, 2021, 54-69.
10 Steven Madoff, ed., What about Activism? (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019).
In the 9th Contour Biennale – Coltan as Cotton (Mechelen, 2019)11 a curatorial strategy was developed that articulates both questions. Concentrating on three moments of three days spread over a year (containing an intensive program of screenings, installations, presentations, workshops, performances, reading groups, and discussions) seems to enable a different awareness of duration, sustainability, and discursivity. In fact, the Contour Biennale has shown that a peripheral biennial has the potential power to be a committed meeting point for experimentation, philosophical deliberation, and other modes of imagination. Moreover, it emphasized once again that such biennials as critical sites for thinking and production mainly engage in exhibiting our contemporaneity, whereby they will also invite us to think about a different understanding and perception of time.
However, it seems primarily academic environments that can offer the experimental space to reevaluate the curatorial format of the biennale – through a well-considered strategy of deceleration and deconstruction – in order to redeploy it for meaningful and knowledge-producing forms of interaction and emancipatory imagination. A leading example of this is the “Research Pavilion project” developed by Uniarts Helsinki.12 Research Pavilion started in 2015 in the Sala del Camino on Giudecca, on the periphery of the Venice Biennale, far away from the fast-paced spectacle of the Giardini. This – critical – distance allowed the Pavilion to develop a more experimental presentation with a strong emphasis on the dynamics of the research exhibition: open-ended, multi-layered, and performative processes, ample time and attention for discursive activities, as well as encouraging the development and dissemination of different kinds of imaginaries. For example, the third Pavilion, Research Ecologies13, did not focus on a curated exhibition, but rather on performing versatile practices of artistic research. The participating researchers displayed various modes of creative thinking in parallel processes of exhibiting, performing, exposing, discussing, articulating material encounters, and related forms of critical reflection in seven different, self-organized, collective “cells.”
11 9th Contour Biennale, curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Mechelen, January 11-October 20, 2019. The Contour Biennale takes place in Mechelen, a small city in Belgium.https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/230267/contour-biennale-9coltan-as-cotton.
12 The first Research Pavilion presentation, titled Experimentality, took place in 2015. See at: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/106657/first-research-pavilion-experimentality.
More information about the Research Pavilion project: https://www.uniarts.fi/en/projects/research-pavilion-project/.
13 Third Research Pavilion, Research Ecologies, Convenors Mika Elo and Henk Slager. Venice Biennale, Sala del Camino, May 8 – August 31, 2019. First announcement: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/219949/research-pavilion-in-venice-2019/. Documentation of the project: https://universes.art/en/venice-biennale/2019/research. Project descriptions and link RUUKKU publication: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/474888/474889. Conclusion of the project (Infolab Project and Symposium at Exhibition Laboratory Uniarts Helsinki): https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/283502/following-up-on-research-pavilion-3-research-ecologies/.
Working from such attitudes and atmospheres, the curatorial narrative of the third Research Pavilion – that presented itself as a process-oriented lab – was fully in line with the topical debate on the posthuman predicament including the situation of the ecological disequilibrium, a relational approach to modes of agency, exploring other modes of mattering, attention for process-oriented ontologies, developing transdisciplinary or transversal discourses, and exploring novel practices of criticism and narrativity in the form of neo-materialistic and monistic propositions.
The third Research Pavilion Research Ecologies did not only call attention to urgent ecological practices, but also explicitly claimed a particular contribution of artistic research to the topical and pressing issues outlined above. By making a connection between the two words “research” and “ecology” – or rather, by placing these two concepts as two focal points of an ellipse or as a continuum – this research pavilion presented a curatorial narrative where the diversity of accents, interconnections, and the multilayeredness of the seven cells are reflected.14 Hence, Research Ecologies deployed not only artistic research’s idiosyncratic way of questioning and working, but also its particular ecologies of practice: how we practice, how we work together, and how we produce (knowledge).
In addition, the third Research Pavilion Research Ecologies demonstrated that artistic research is one of the few creative practices where transversal thinking is possible. And that is why artistic research has the capacity to fathom the logic of ecologies: not as an intelligibility of discursive sets, but, in line with Guattari, as an eco-logic of intensities.15 Such transversalability enables artistic research to think and imagine in a way that is urgently needed after the disappearance of a common planet. In other words, artistic research can provide another distribution of coordinates and metaphors of temporality: new fictions and imaginaries to address the constituencies and configurations of the present and speculate about terrestrial perspectives and future directions.
In light of this topical question about the consciousness of time – and likewise how time appears to be a politicized concept – we currently see a deliberate refusal or disclosure of time in many committed exhibition practices, for example, by pointing out that exhibition is a verb. Thus, opposition seems to be raised against a narrowed concept of time: a regulated time, a synchronized time, an allegedly objective physical clock time, which ultimately equates to a global measurement that temporalizes everything else, and denies any form of coevalness: any form of anachronism is excluded for the sake of producing history and acceleration. Such a reducing strategy – today referred to as “chronopolitics”16 – therefore asks for critical, alternative approaches, like being open to different temporal imaginaries and allochronisms. We will have to free ourselves from the yoke of abstract time, and once again draw attention to liveable time: the time in which we still can intervene and shape the condition of human life. It currently seems that liveable time is exhausted, especially now that the perspective and promise of the future has decreased. What remains is the linear perspective of an irreversible destruction.17 However, what we know for sure is that there still is an understanding of limits – limits of dignity, limits of the intolerable, and the limits that we can discern and therefore indicate – and that here still lies our fundamental critical capacity: the art of making the limits apparent and of drawing from the moral, aesthetic, and political consequences of this possibility. And with that, a clear assignment arises for experimental biennials to develop investigative display systems and discursive formats that stimulate the generation of new values from a critical perception of the intolerable.18
14 The Third Research Pavilion consisted of seven cells: 1. Disruptive Processes: offering a temporary agora for material negotiations, exploring ecological and urban environments, human-non-human assemblages, collective agency, modes of non-commodification, unlearning processes and activism; 2. AIRA – Artistic Intelligence Research Alternator: staging a focus on new matters of fiction, novel narratives, e.g. material realities, onto-stories, and speculative realism; 3. Cemetry Archipelago: enabling encounters of human and non-human agencies, material processes, imaginaries, and necropolitical articulations; 4. Territories: investigating non-native territories, practicing and exploring modes of transversal thinking, using sculptural approaches, translating audio-waves in material surfaces; 5. Phenomena Themselves: rereading and connecting phenomenology and speculative realism, rethinking subjectivity and exteriority, to open up new material(ist) perspectives for artistic research; 6. Traces from the Anthropocene: focusing on the human footprint, the ecological disequilibrium that threatens the continuation of life on the planet’s surface causing the disappearance of insects; and 7. Soil: presenting craft making as a research practice creating an Earth Laboratory that focuses on vibrant matters, material agency, i.e. on what material can do.
15 Felix Guattari introduced in Three Ecologies (London: The Athlone Press, 1989) three complementary practices: mental ecology, social ecology, and environmental ecology. In our current capitalist era, the cohesion between these three practices seems to have been deteriorated. The psyche, the socius, and the environment are now understood almost completely separated. Therefore, it is imperative, Guattari says, that we learn again to understand and experience the interactions and connections between the three different ecosystems. To that end, we have to start thinking transversally: an apprehension of the world through the interchangeable lenses of the three ecologies. Then it will become apparent that social problems and environmental problems cannot be seen separately. For example, with the disappearance of biodiversity, expressions of solidarity seem to evaporate. Transversal thinking, Guattari predicts, will ultimately lead to a redefinition and a refocus of emancipatory ecologies: producing new modes of knowledge, new sensibilities, new micropolitical practices, new sociabilities and solidarities, new existential configurations, and new aesthetic practices.
16 Cf. Renate Lorenz, ed., Now, Now, Now: Chronopolitics, Art & Research (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015). This perspective is also further elaborated in my publication Collateral Concepts (London: Stenberg Press, 2026). See at: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781915609946/collateral-concepts/.
17 Marina Garces, “Conditio Posthumana”, in The Great Regression (Cambridge: John Willey & Sons 2017).
18 It is precisely this challenge that is central to the curatorial narrative of the 6th Asia Triennial Manchester, Transvaluation. This triennial can also be seen as an excellent example of a think-tank-type, discourse production oriented triennial: a medium-sized triennial developed by an academic institution in a non-centrally located city, strategically collaborating with local art partners. The 6th edition focused – from the same discursive attention, and through the same infrastructural strategy – on a topical, artistic interpretation of “transvaluation” by drawing attention to an understanding of the potential of art to present and represent different notions of value in the global contemporary. To this end, Transvaluation states that artistic research should be seen as a space for critical reflection, speculation, and imagination while taking the relativity and historicity of all values as its starting point. Moreover, Transvaluation emphasizes that it is not about reduced values as expressed in the economic system, but about values as they are affectively and intensively lived and hence contribute to an inscription of meaning to the world. With that goal in mind, Transvaluation developed a series of propositions that focus on artistic research’s ability to generate conditions and axioms for other ways of living and learning associated with such a reconfiguration. See more in special issue Curatography:
https://curatography.org/sp-en/. Project documentation available at: https://universes.art/en/asia-triennial-manchester/2025.
1 Tony Bennett’s Foucauldian analysis of the cultural conditions of the emergence of the museum in the nineteenth century revealed the processes by which a universal concept of “man – the outcome of evolution” – came to be posited as the object, and subject of knowledge, to the exclusion of other discursive formations. (Tony Benett, The Birth of the Museum, London/New York: Routledge, 1995). Steven Madoff situates the topicality of Benett’s “exhibitionary complex” in An Enfolding: The Exhibitionary Complex and The Self, Critical Curating, 2025. Available at: https://www.thecuratorial.net/index/critical-curating/an-enfolding-madoff.
2 Okwui Enwezor, “Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form,” 2004. Reprinted in The Biennial Reader, ed. Elena Filipovic et al. (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 426-445.
3 René Block, “Foreword,” Catalogue 8th Sydney Biennale, The Readymade Boomerang, 1990.
4 Prior to the first Bergen Assembly 2012, an international conference took place in 2009 asking the following question: How to Biennial? This led to the following outline: “Bergen Assembly has the ambition of working prognostically, allowing newly emerging initiatives to be investigated in light of their future potential.” See at: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/38383/call-for-biennial-knowledge.
5 It was the perspective of epistemic response-ability linked to the troubled present that was further elaborated in the curatorial proposal Any Speculation Whatever (Exhibition, Screening, and Seminars) for the 14th Havana Biennale Future and Contemporaneity (November 12, 2021 – April 30, 2022), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana). A series of propositions (Participating artists: Femke Herregraven, Ursula Biemann, Lara Almarcegui, Irene Kopelman, Terike Haapoja, and Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan. Curator: Henk Slager) emerged which, in dialogue with local artists and audiences, could expand urgent planetary issues and concepts such as chronopolitics, non-linear time, care, climate change, ecopolitics, new modes of subjectivity, and other imaginaries related to the societal role and agency of contemporary art. These propositions focus on the capacity to bring those issues and concepts together, to abduct different modes of knowledges and insights, while melding them together into an instantiation of our contemporary conditions. These perspectives are further elaborated in various contributions (including Margarita Gonzalez Lorente and Henk Slager) in the publication Expo-Facto. Into the Algorithm of the Exhibition, eds. Henk Slager and Mick Wilson (Utrecht: Metropolis M Books, 2022). https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portal/announcement?announcement=1775230
6 Beatrice von Bismarck, The Curatorial Condition (London: Sternberg Press, 2022).
7 Claire Bishop, “Information Overload”, chapter in Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, London: Verso, 2024. Prepublication in Artforum: Information Overload: On the superabundance of research-based art: https://www.artforum.com/features/claire-bishop-on-the-superabundance-of-research-based-art-252571/.
8 Anselm Franke, “Notes on the Research-Based Exhibitions,” in Exhibition Matters, GAM 14, Milicia Tomic and Dubravska Sekulic (eds.), 2018, 144-147. A striking example of this essayistic form is the curatorial project Modern Monsters by Anselm Franke, 8th Taipei Biennial, 2012. https://universes.art/en/taipei-biennial/2012.
9 Nick Aikens, “Approaching Research-Exhibition Practices,” in Vector: Critical Research in Context, issue: Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination, Iasi, 2021, 54-69.
10 Steven Madoff, ed., What about Activism? (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019).
11 9th Contour Biennale, curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Mechelen, January 11-October 20, 2019. The Contour Biennale takes place in Mechelen, a small city in Belgium.https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/230267/contour-biennale-9coltan-as-cotton.
12 The first Research Pavilion presentation, titled Experimentality, took place in 2015. See at: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/106657/first-research-pavilion-experimentality. More information about the Research Pavilion project: https://www.uniarts.fi/en/projects/research-pavilion-project/.
13 Third Research Pavilion, Research Ecologies, Convenors Mika Elo and Henk Slager. Venice Biennale, Sala del Camino, May 8 – August 31, 2019. First announcement: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/219949/research-pavilion-in-venice-2019/. Documentation of the project: https://universes.art/en/venice-biennale/2019/research. Project descriptions and link RUUKKU publication: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/474888/474889. Conclusion of the project (Infolab Project and Symposium at Exhibition Laboratory Uniarts Helsinki): https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/283502/following-up-on-research-pavilion-3-research-ecologies/.
14 The Third Research Pavilion consisted of seven cells: 1. Disruptive Processes: offering a temporary agora for material negotiations, exploring ecological and urban environments, human-non-human assemblages, collective agency, modes of non-commodification, unlearning processes and activism; 2. AIRA – Artistic Intelligence Research Alternator: staging a focus on new matters of fiction, novel narratives, e.g. material realities, onto-stories, and speculative realism; 3. Cemetry Archipelago: enabling encounters of human and non-human agencies, material processes, imaginaries, and necropolitical articulations; 4. Territories: investigating non-native territories, practicing and exploring modes of transversal thinking, using sculptural approaches, translating audio-waves in material surfaces; 5. Phenomena Themselves: rereading and connecting phenomenology and speculative realism, rethinking subjectivity and exteriority, to open up new material(ist) perspectives for artistic research; 6. Traces from the Anthropocene: focusing on the human footprint, the ecological disequilibrium that threatens the continuation of life on the planet’s surface causing the disappearance of insects; and 7. Soil: presenting craft making as a research practice creating an Earth Laboratory that focuses on vibrant matters, material agency, i.e. on what material can do.
15 Felix Guattari introduced in Three Ecologies (London: The Athlone Press, 1989) three complementary practices: mental ecology, social ecology, and environmental ecology. In our current capitalist era, the cohesion between these three practices seems to have been deteriorated. The psyche, the socius, and the environment are now understood almost completely separated. Therefore, it is imperative, Guattari says, that we learn again to understand and experience the interactions and connections between the three different ecosystems. To that end, we have to start thinking transversally: an apprehension of the world through the interchangeable lenses of the three ecologies. Then it will become apparent that social problems and environmental problems cannot be seen separately. For example, with the disappearance of biodiversity, expressions of solidarity seem to evaporate. Transversal thinking, Guattari predicts, will ultimately lead to a redefinition and a refocus of emancipatory ecologies: producing new modes of knowledge, new sensibilities, new micropolitical practices, new sociabilities and solidarities, new existential configurations, and new aesthetic practices.
16 Cf. Renate Lorenz, ed., Now, Now, Now: Chronopolitics, Art & Research (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015). This perspective is also further elaborated in my publication Collateral Concepts (London: Stenberg Press, 2026). See at: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781915609946/collateral-concepts/.
17 Marina Garces, “Conditio Posthumana”, in The Great Regression (Cambridge: John Willey & Sons 2017).
18 It is precisely this challenge that is central to the curatorial narrative of the 6th Asia Triennial Manchester, Transvaluation. This triennial can also be seen as an excellent example of a think-tank-type, discourse production oriented triennial: a medium-sized triennial developed by an academic institution in a non-centrally located city, strategically collaborating with local art partners. The 6th edition focused – from the same discursive attention, and through the same infrastructural strategy – on a topical, artistic interpretation of “transvaluation” by drawing attention to an understanding of the potential of art to present and represent different notions of value in the global contemporary. To this end, Transvaluation states that artistic research should be seen as a space for critical reflection, speculation, and imagination while taking the relativity and historicity of all values as its starting point. Moreover, Transvaluation emphasizes that it is not about reduced values as expressed in the economic system, but about values as they are affectively and intensively lived and hence contribute to an inscription of meaning to the world. With that goal in mind, Transvaluation developed a series of propositions that focus on artistic research’s ability to generate conditions and axioms for other ways of living and learning associated with such a reconfiguration. See more in special issue Curatography: https://curatography.org/sp-en/. Project documentation available at: https://universes.art/en/asia-triennial-manchester/2025.
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Author
Henk Slager’s focus has been on research and visual art for the last twenty years. He was a Lecturer at De Appel Curatorial Program (1995-2020), Visiting Professor of Artistic Research (Uniarts Helsinki 2010-2015, 2024-), and Dean of MaHKU Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (HKU Utrecht 2003-2018). He is currently working for the same school on the development of a practice-based doctoral program. Henk Slager co-initiated the European Artistic Research Network (EARN), a network investigating the consequences of artistic research for current art education through symposia, expert meetings, and presentations. Departing from a similar focus on artistic research he published The Pleasure of Research, an overview of curatorial research projects (a.o. Shanghai Biennale, 2008; Tbilisi Triennial, 2012; Aesthetic Jam Taipei Biennial, 2014; 5th Guangzhou Triennial, 2015; Research Pavilion Venice, 2015-2019; and 9th Bucharest Biennale, 2020). A follow-up publication will be presented in 2025.
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