Biennale?

Dubrovnik Biennial doesn’t seek to reproduce a typical Biennial form which relies on the patronage of large institutions and support from local government in return for delivering a safe and convenient Biennial PR package. Following two years of people around the world responding to Covid through investing in grassroots, community-based, self-organized initiatives, we should be able to understand that Biennials can be done differently, that they can managed and realised in the margins using relatively humble resources. We’re not talking about geographical margins, but rather margins in terms of economical or institutional status. Of course another large-scale conventional Biennial would be easy to establish in Dubrovnik. Although Dubrovnik apparently has minimal interest in culture according to the percentage of income that’s invested in art, it’s a very rich city with plenty of incredible interior and exterior venues, and it’s easy to navigate. Such a Biennial could happily come and go without leaving much in terms of social or political trace. A ‘conventional’ Biennial would no doubt positively affect the cultural and economic landscape, but we’re proposing something far more progressive. We’re approaching the idea of a Biennial from a different position - extensive, discursive, embedded, networked, educational, inclusive, non-spectacular. We want the question of what a Biennial might be and what it might ‘do’ to be explored within the local community. We envisage a low-key, long-term series of events and workshops as the prologue to something that we might call an exhibition, an exhibition that takes place biannually. In this case ‘exhibition’ is a broad term, expansive, permissive and promiscuous. Workshops have already began! So far discussions seem to have focused on the contemporary value of art and relationship between art and exclusivity. We plan to make a small publication which documents the questions that workshop participants posed in relation the idea of a Dubrovnik Biennial. In the spirit of bypassing bureaucratic restrictions and formal infrastructure and at the same time exposing the discursive nature of our approach, these questions were originally formed as hand-made posters to be publicly distributed around the city. Further workshops are scheduled...