During the early phase of the Cold War, the cultural policy deployed by the Pan-American Union channelled the 19th century Latin Americanism under a hemispheric perspective that abandoned the folklorist gaze towards Latin American artistic practices and highlighted their articulations with the processes of Western modernity. However, the Cuban revolution, the missile crisis and the policy of the Alliance for Progress in the region reactivated inter-American political-cultural tensions and the Latin Americanism assumed in the mid-1960s took an anti-imperialist turn, which resisted the North American presence and favoured a new continental revolutionary utopia that materialised via transatlantic artistic-intellectual networks. The economic and political instability and the weakening of public institutions that characterised the 1970s allowed for the advance of market dynamics in the art scene, and soon the logics of capital took root, operating also in the redefinitions of the Latin American.

The international art auction market introduced a special section for Latin American art, and more private galleries emerged specifically dedicated to marketing it. Alongside the multiplication of Latin American exhibitions one could clearly note an intensification of the critical debate on cultural identity that expressed in a multiplication of gatherings, articles in specialised regional as well as foreign magazines, books and special issues devoted to the question. They gave rise to new theoretical approaches that analysed the regional artistic production in relation with its socio-economic and political realities, in several cases adapting proposals by Third World authors. The Havana Biennial in the 1980s consolidated the innovative proposal of a new non-European biennial model, centred on the cultural production of Latin American, African and Asian countries. This dynamic of exchanges led to the redefinition of Latin Americanism with an important aspect becoming its links with developing countries. US interventions in Central America revitalised Cold War tensions and added to the multiplication of street protests by the Latin American community, which had become by then the largest minority in the US. Museum institutions gradually accommodated the new social agendas and began to collect and exhibit Latino art in the United States with the help of multinational capital. The prevailing Latin Americanism of the late 1980s translated into the instrumentalisation of Latin American art and culture for electoral proselytising and the global art market.

Multinational corporations, banks and other private capital left their mark on visual arts policies. The models of representation of the Latin American disseminated through blockbuster exhibitions, which were financed by institutions and multinationals from the global North, generated in the early 1990s critical responses from the curatorial field and the art-historic practice in Latin America. Consequently, they exposed the geopolitical and economic uses that Latin Americanism had served and inaugurated the contemporary stage, in which the colonial legacies implicit in the totalising identitarian impulse are reviewed and criticised from a more open, dynamic and fluid conception of the Latin American in the arts.

At the end of the 1990s, in a recently unified Berlin, Gerhard Haupt coined this term to refer to the multiplication of biennials and the ubiquity of certain artists and curators, regardless of the characteristics of the place and the singularity of the mega-exhibition. In 1997, this time in Italy, exponents of the Venice-, São Paulo-, Istanbul-, Dakar-, Perth-, Pittsburg-, Costa Rica-, Havana-, Austin-, Sydney-, Bangkok- and Johannesburg biennials came together in a meeting organised by the Rockefeller Foundation. The purpose was to study and discuss “the rise and proliferation of large-scale international exhibitions“. On that occasion, the dissemination of the model was perceived to such extent as positive that Okwui Enwezor, who participated in the event, underlined that it offered the possibility of carrying out a “paradigm shift”.

Shortly afterwards, in 2001, the Revista de Occidente published a text by Ivo Mesquita that began with a seemingly infinite list of biennials. In a few lines the curator from São Paulo went through the five continents and finished by asking whether biennials are redundant or entropic. In those years a series of congresses that connected Europe, Asia and Australia was taking place within the event framework Biennials in Dialogue (2000-2008). The first was illustrated by the cartoon “What our village now needs is a biennial!”: a man, with a destroyed city behind him, delivers the resounding message to the camera. Olav Westphalen’s drawing captures the sogni e conflitti [dreams and conflicts] of the biennialization. In fact, the backdrop of the sentence uttered by the man is overwhelmingly complex: from the revolutionary dream of the Havana Biennial (1984) to the cascade effect of the Documenta (2002), via the Venetian replicas in São Paulo (1951) and Sydney (1973) and Maurizio Cattelan’s biennial-parody (1999).

What is biennialization? A democratic redistribution of cultural power or a new form of Western colonization? An inert repetition of a model or a challenge to provide new spaces and temporalities? The dichotomy is intrinsic to the concept as the very phenomenon it describes works in two ways. On the one hand, it contributes to the perpetuation of a dominant model, while at the same time questioning it; on the other, it challenges the system, while at the same time repeating and affirming it.