The biennial, as a now-universal format for exhibiting both art and global relevance, has, as the adjective ‘universal’ suggests, paid the price of risking the loss of those sharper edges which might once have cut incisively into the cultural sphere. Once celebrated as the primary vehicle for neoliberal soft power and international cultural mobility, the biennial format has arguably devolved into a reflex solution for the low morale of art institutions and their surrounding communities. As we navigate the post-pandemic yet crisis-ridden mid-2020s, there tolls a heavy cost and a palpable fatigue associated with the large-scale model of exhibition production and curatorial strategy. The biennial’s proliferation since the 1990s has witnessed a crystallising process of ‘biennialization’—a phenomenon extensively documented by Marchart, O’Neill, Sassatelli, Tang—which simultaneously confirms its celebratory status whilst indicating its decline as a meaningful form of showcasing artworks.¹

In recent urban discourse, the biennial has been critically framed by Julie Ren as a ‘theme park folly,’ a site of ‘pure imageability’ that establishes host cities as cultural destinations while remaining largely oblivious to the everyday needs or the social fabric of the city itself.² To ask ‘why we still do the biennial?’ is no longer a question of cultural branding—which it should never have been—but rather a responsible reflection on its natural and social environmental sustainability, its intellectual integrity, and its commitment to progressive aesthetics. In the context of the 14th Taipei Biennial, titled Whispers on the Horizon, the answer must be unpacked through a tripartite lens: defining what the biennial can do in a post-global era, examining how curatorial ambitions are critically enacted within specific architectural constraints, and identifying the methodologies required to sustain its relevance within and beyond the museum’s perimeter.

Institution and its Confinement

However diverse they may be in their themes, curatorial strategies, and organising interims, biennials share a common lineage that serves as the basis of their common self-representation and global networking. Whether they are titled as a biennial, triennial, quinquennial, or decennial, these events all fall under the broad category of exhibition-making termed the ‘biennial’. As Claudette Lauzon observes, the term ‘biennial culture’ has come increasingly to stand for recurring large-scale international exhibitions, hosted by cities to often boost their international profiles, and organised by guest curators around specific themes.³ From this global pattern, one can identify a peculiar characteristic of the Taipei Biennial: its profound white-cube containment.

Unlike other biennials to which it might have aspired—or possibly considered as counterparts—such as those in Venice or Gwangju, which spill into the urban fabric, Taipei’s iteration remains almost exclusively tethered to the Brutalist architecture of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). This prompts a vital curatorial question regarding the ontology of the event: if the biennial does not reach outside the museum walls, how does it truly differ from a standard blockbuster exhibition? Structurally, the Taipei Biennial can be examined through the example of the Whitney Biennial. While separated by geography and cultural specificities, both adhere to a model based on one singular museum, where the expansive, often chaotic energy of a biennial is surgically contained within the perimeter of one institutional building. For both, the biennial is not an urban intervention but an interiorised event.

This containment shifts the biennial’s function from that of a civic catalyst to an institutional celebration. In an era where the sprawl of the Venice Biennale or the scatter of Skulptur Projekte Münster are seen as the gold standards for urban engagement, Taipei’s iteration remains almost exclusively tethered to TFAM, which poses uneasy questions as to its uniqueness and necessity. In the case of a single-institution-based biennial, the execution can be, through total control of the situation, significantly less taxing from an administrative standpoint. The museum involves less tangled networks, and from the perspective of management, the artwork-visitor complex is hot-housed and supervised from the entrance to the exit. The biennial is thus a complete interior event, not much progressed from what Peter Sloterdijk discerns as the true nature of the 1851 Great Exhibitions held in London’s Crystal Palace: a domestically organised and artificially climatised inner space.⁴

The clearly demarcated space of TFAM becomes a sanctuary where radical discourse is permitted precisely because it is bracketed by the museum’s walls. However, it should be noted that the danger of turning self-reliance into self-complacency does not inevitably prevent criticality from emerging. The biennial can serve as a chance for institutional reset. For a state-run institution like TFAM, the biennial functions as a periodic rupture in its standard programming. It allows the institution to, to some extent, divert from its own internal routine practice and thinking. It is a moment where the museum imports curatorial capital from the outside—in the case of the 14th edition, via Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath—to perform a software update on its intellectual framework. The risk of becoming simply another large-scale, celebrity-curator-backed international group exhibition is offset by turning the institutional space into a site of friction where disparate global and local currents collide.

The Architecture of the 14th Taipei Biennial: Gallery Rooms Re-activated

The 14th Taipei Biennial serves as a pivotal case study for the biennial’s unique position, attending to the structural defects that often incapacitate meaningful exhibition and visitor engagement. Under the curatorial direction of Bardaouil and Fellrath, the exhibition navigates the inherent tensions of its own containment within TFAM. To understand the 2025 edition, one must look toward the curators’ leadership at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, where they pioneered a shift from the museum as a static repository to a participatory, civic organisation. Since January 2022, Bardaouil and Fellrath have redefined the curatorial mandate of Hamburger Bahnhof. Before their tenure, the institution—housed in a monumental 19th-century railway station—operated primarily as a site for canon-formation. The strategy was largely retrospective and authoritative.

Having frequented Hamburger Bahnhof almost every summer since 2015 until the pandemic, I often left unimpressed despite its branding as a cool destination. The venue is unique in being purposefully re-appropriated rather than purpose-built, yet the exhibitions often failed to enable playful engagement—an engagement that should not be equated with immersive spectacle but from which critical aesthetics can originate. My 2023 visit, nevertheless, saw a much-changed institution. Through shows including Eva Fàbregas’ Devouring Lovers and Fred Sandback’s Simple Facts, the act of meandering into the museum became a spatial practice that was both contemplative and stimulating. The artworks and the space were brought together meaningfully, in the sense that their shared situatedness brings into existence each other’s experiential properties and aesthetic qualities, rather than them just being inserted based on the principle of availability.

Drawing on Bardaouil’s background in theatre practice and Fellrath’s expertise in economics and political science, they operate an approach which is revisionist and interdisciplinary. Moving beyond the didactic model, the institution allows art as an experience to be truly bodily and intellectually realised by the visitor. This focus on staging rather than merely hanging art is palpable in the 14th Taipei Biennial. Their spatial practice involves a theatricalisation of the white cube, where architecture is treated as a language with its own grammar and its socio-cultural past is recognised. In Taipei, this manifested through a methodology of ‘softening,’ a direct response to the architectural challenges posed by TFAM.