From 17-20 September, 2009, the Bergen Biennial Conference will take place.  It’s about time the status of *the biennial* is critically examined by the pool of people most likely to be charged with the task to direct them.  I hope there is plenty of sedition, because it’s needed.  As Dan Fox, senior editor of Frieze, lays it down, perhaps some biennials, Venice in particular, should be postponed for a few years, like a crop left fallow so that new seeds can have a chance to grow.  These shows tend to flatten difference, as Jennifer Higgie writes; and when they are curated wrongheadedly, partly because cultural politics, and economics dictate that they need to pander to as many people as possible, you get vague, catch-all themes like Fare Mondi and Plateau of Humankind. Where do these titles get us as a civilization?  Nowhere.

Here is the conference’s statement, from their website:

As scholars and curators have recently acknowledged, the history of exhibitions is both one of the most vital and, paradoxically, ignored narratives of our cultural history. And given the increasing role of biennials and other perennial exhibitions of contemporary art in contemporary culture, it seems all the more necessary to critically examine them today. The impetus to do so now comes in response to the Bergen City Council’s plans to establish a biennial for contemporary art in Bergen, Norway, for which the Bergen Kunsthall has taken up the task of organizing an international conference and think tank to study and discuss the status of the biennial as an exhibition model, and also to launch a debate concerning the plans for a biennial in Bergen.

The Bergen Biennial Conference will bring together an international group of curators, critics, artists, and thinkers so as to benefit from their discussions of their findings, and create the occasion to reflect collectively about the practice and potential of biennials as institutions. Poised to be one of the most extensive examinations of the biennial phenomenon to date, the conference aims to identify and explore existing ‘biennial knowledge’ from different regions of the world and will be made up of three days of lectures as well as seminar style workshops with young and leading professionals in the field. It will be complemented with an extensive publication, The Biennial Reader, including existing seminal texts on biennials from around the world as well as newly commissioned texts.