São Paulo ready for big-budget biennial

Emotionally engaging their audience—with a little help from YouTube—is the name of the curators’ game

By Adrian Ellis. Focus, Issue 260, September 2014

Published online: 02 September 2014

The Bienal de São Paulo returns to Oscar Niemeyer’s pavilion in Ibirapuera Park this month. Above, lead curator Charles Esche

The 31st Bienal de São Paulo opens this month in Ibirapuera Park, where the event has been held since its fourth edition in 1957. It is organised by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, which took over responsibility from the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art in 1962 and has run it ever since.

São Paulo was, of course, only the second biennial to be established, in 1951—56 years after Venice, on which it was explicitly modelled. The event was championed by European-oriented industrialists such as Assis Chateaubriand and the Italian immigrant Ciccillo Matarazzo, after whom the unforgiving, 30,000 sq. m., Niemeyer-designed pavilion in the park is named. It was effectively the first large-scale exhibition of Modern art outside Europe and North America, with 1,800 works from 23 countries. 

The biennial has had a volatile history since then, with two bankruptcies and a long chapter of isolation and partial boycott between 1965 and 1973, during the military dictatorship. It really only got back its mojo and its international standing with its 16th edition in 1981, when the pioneering and highly regarded Brazilian critic and curator Walter Zanini corralled Brazilian and international contemporary artists into a critically acclaimed thematic exhibition around visual analogies for language. 

Hopes for this year are high: the biennial has been organised by an international team led by Charles Esche, the director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and a veteran of biennials in Gwangju (2002), Istanbul (2005), Riwaq, Palestine (2007 and 2009) and Ljubljana (2010). That is an intimidating list of credits. This year’s event has an overall budget of around $11m, supported by the extraordinarily generous tax regime that Brazil has for corporate sponsorship, although the budget for art is obviously significantly less, as Esche has noted. 

Esche and his team (Galit Eilat, Pablo Lafuente, Nuria Enguita Mayo and Oren Sagiv) have given a series of interviews that offer fascinating and occasionally prurient insights into the process of grappling with the biennial beast in general and the Bienal beast in particular—the recruitment process, the unforgiving character of the space and their ambitions to broaden the social base of the artists who participate and the visitors who attend (visit YouTube, or scroll to the bottom of this article, for a talk organised with the Israeli Center for Digital Art). The reflections and commentaries of Esche and his team make compelling YouTube viewing.

The growth trajectory of the biennial is, of course, similar to that of the contemporary art museum and the commercial art fair, and accompanied by similar commentaries about their links to globalisation, to imminent saturation of the market and to “instrumental” motives that are only tangentially related to cultural production but umbilically related to tourism, economic development and urban regeneration.

The format of large-scale temporary exhibitions of contemporary work, often ephemeral or site-specific and drawn from and aimed at an international audience, has become an integral part of the art world. Some, like Havana and Istanbul’s initiatives in the 1990s, have been highly idealistic in their informing motives, seeking to create an artistic centre of gravity outside the pull of the West. 

Like the 250-odd biennials around the world that have followed São Paulo in the 63 years since it was founded, the motives for the creation of the Brazilian event were as much about cultural diplomacy and economic development as they were about the visual arts. As the founding committee put it: “We have to put Modern Brazilian art in active contact with the rest of the world, and try to establish the city of São Paulo as an international art centre.” 

Today, Esche is promoting a less instrumental agenda. “I don’t think we need to once again announce that we’re going to reinvent the idea of the Bienal. We need to make a really good Bienal. We need to make an event, an exhibition, an experience that touches people,” he told Time Out magazine in São Paulo.

The challenge of developing and executing a coherent artistic agenda—a show that succeeds on its own terms—in the rickety, transitory, financially and organisationally opaque world of biennials is the default theme of the hardy breed of curators whose line of work this is. Many try it and are driven away by frustration with the primacy of spectacle and vernissage, and by the sheer intractability of getting things done, even when the event is well established and ostensibly well funded. 

Esche and his veteran team, in contrast, give the impression that the challenge of navigating these straits is a large part of what stimulates their creativity; that the task of developing a concept and then grappling with a client who has only partially overlapping goals is what motivates them. “I need to question traditions and ways of working – the way the building works, the way the commissioning system works – and see whether it needs to be done differently,” Esche told Time Out.

Adrian Ellis is a director of AEA Consulting 

Politics not just part of Bienal’s past

This year’s edition aims to prompt discussions about the social and economic problems facing Brazil

By Pac Pobric. Focus, Issue 260, September 2014

Published online: 02 September 2014

Danica Dakic’s video El Dorado, 2006-07

Art biennials have always had political implications. In 1951, when São Paulo became the first city since Venice (in 1895) to found a contemporary art exhibition to present work from around the world, the intention was to highlight Brazil’s growing international importance. The country’s GDP grew, on average, 7.4% a year between 1950 and 1960, and by the time of the Bienal de São Paulo’s second edition in 1953, the city boasted a population of 2.6 million people.

The 1953 edition of the biennial included representation from 39 countries, and the United Nations was also present. But after the 1964 coup d’état, which ushered in a military government that ruled Brazil until 1985, a number of nations dropped out of the show. The US was among them, and only returned in 1973, after Brazilian organisers assured American officials that there would be no censorship.

Today, the role of individual countries is less important. The national pavilions that were formerly used to organise the show have made way for alternative models focusing on individual artists, regardless of where they come from. But politics remain at the forefront of the event. Charles Esche, the lead curator of this year’s edition, says that his team’s goal is to show art that opens up a conversation between people of different persuasions. “In a sense, representative democracy needs to be reinvented,” he says. “Art is one way of imagining something outside that system.”

Esche insists that the show does not have utopian aspirations. “I wouldn’t want to use that word because a utopia is an unlocated place,” he says, referring to its literal definition as “no place”. Instead, the biennial is about the political conditions of existing communities. Around half of the expected 500,000 visitors will be school groups, who will be invited to engage with the art as a catalyst for conversations about the problems facing Brazil. The art on view is meant to be a tool “to unlock certain topics that are often overlooked”, Esche says.

Esche and his team have a considerable amount of material to deal with. More than 250 works of art are due to go on display, supported by an overall budget of $11m. But Esche insists that this edition of the biennial is about more than just numbers. “Art tries to express something that is greater than just economics or simple factual analysis,” he says. 

Across the divide: artists’ political projects

The Senegalese artist El Hadji Sy was invited to spend two-and-a-half months in São Paulo as an artist in residence to prepare for his presentation. His work focuses on the Brazilian slave trade, which brought an estimated four million Africans to the country between the 16th and 19th centuries. “The history of slavery has never quite been processed in Brazil,” Esche says, adding that it still marks Brazilian society today. El Sy’s installation includes references to quilombo, settlements developed in the country by slaves who had escaped.

Danica Dakic was born in Sarajevo in 1962 and splits her time between the Bosnian city and Dusseldorf. Drawing on her own life experience, she has often worked with immigrant communities for her art. Last year, Dakic spent time in St Louis, Missouri, working with the city’s large Bosnian population for a forthcoming show at the Laumeier Sculpture Park. Her work at the biennial will partly focus on another community: under-privileged children who attend a Brazilian Catholic school in São Paulo. Esche says that Dakic’s previous work with Bosnian immigrants informs the project. “The context in Brazil is different, but there are strong parallels.”

In the northern Brazilian city of Belém, local newspapers often print photographs of convicted criminals. While leafing through the papers, the Brazilian artist Éder Oliveira noticed that the criminals were almost always minorities. “Crime is one of the control mechanisms in Brazil, as it is in many other places,” Esche says. “But it’s more raw in some places than in others.” Oliveira appropriated the images and made a series of large, “semi-heroic” wall paintings of the photographs for the biennial, Esche says. Although the works were made to be shown outdoors, the curatorial team plans to bring them into the biennial’s pavilion. 

Last year, the Turkish artist Halil Altindere made a work called Wonderland. The music video-style film followed a group of disillusioned youths in the Sulukule neighbourhood of Istanbul as they sang about gentrification and economic and political inequality. The work, which will be shown in São Paulo, touches on local issues, even though it is about a foreign community. “It’s a common theme in Brazil,” Esche says, noting that many people in the city still live in slums. The curators organised the biennial from their base in Brazil, but they decided to include a number of artists, such as Altindere, whose work otherwise might not be seen in Latin America.

Peru’s civil war is still officially ongoing, although it has quietened down considerably since its violent peak in the mid-1980s. Museo Travesti, a performance project founded by the Peruvian artist Giuseppe Campuzano, emerged from the conflict as an attempt to offer an alternative political model based on the fluidity of gender. “Transsexuality in Peru had a political edge to it,” Esche says. He says that including Museo Travesti in the biennial is about drawing parallels between sexual and political transitions and the possibilities that both offer.