CANCELLED EVENT

As a precautionary measure and based upon the advice from our expert panel, the ANU is cancelling all public and social events from Monday 16 March until the end of semester one, Saturday 20 June. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience and share with you our disappointment that we cannot deliver these events at this time.

In this lecture Dr Anthony Gardner will speak about his recent book Biennials, Triennials, and documenta, co-written with Charles Green.

The book narrates a history of biennales that spans three key periods from 1895 until today, three “waves” of the large-scale international exhibitions that have transformed contemporary art making, display and reception. Each wave, the book argues, offered a distinct way of framing and understanding art’s engagement with the world, from narratives of nation at the height of modernism, through to the regionalist solidarities of the Cold War era, and then on to the globalist aspirations of our neoliberal present.

Anthony Gardner will take a closer view of biennales in Asia, and speculates on what might an account of biennales in Asia look like and how might that focus challenge and transform the kinds of narratives offered by our “three-wave” model? Can it invite a more nuanced account of what biennales can offer its myriad publics (whether artists, audiences, historians or sponsors), so as to enrich the histories of these exhibitions in the world?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr Anthony Gardner is Head of the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford, where he teaches Contemporary Art History and Theory and is a Fellow of The Queen’s College. He has published widely on subjects including postcolonialism, postsocialism and curatorial histories, and is an editor of the MIT Press journal ARTMargins.

Among his books are Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations (Melbourne, 2013), Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (MIT Press, 2015) and, also through MIT Press in 2015, the anthology Neue Slowenische Kunst: From Kapital to Capital (with Zdenka Badovinac and Eda Čufer), which was a finalist for the 2017 Alfred H Barr Award for best exhibition catalogue worldwide.

His latest book, co-authored with Charles Green (University of Melbourne), is Biennials, Triennials and documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art, published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2016. He is currently working on two new projects: a study of curatorial debates and practices of alternative internationalisms from the 1950s-80s (such as the nonaligned movement and third cinema), called “Reworldings: Curatorial Histories from the Cold War”; and a critical curatorial history of the work of Okwui Enwezor and his collaborators.

Time: 6pm, Monday 16 March 2020

Location: Theatrette, Sir Roland Wilson Building, 120 McCoy Cct, Canberra ACT 2600

Free | All welcome | RSVP Essential

Dr Anthony Gardner visit has been supported and made possible by the Research School of Humanities & the Arts’ External Visitor Funding.