In a year that is playing havoc with planning of any sort, three biennials have issued road maps for the coming months. The fifth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which has so far benefited from a scheduled opening late in the year, is sticking to its original dates of 12 December 2020 – 10 April 2021 and has just published a first list of participating artists. The 25 or so individuals and collectives announced by Shubigi Rao, the Singaporean artist curating the biennial, range from Ali Cherri to Zina Saro-Wiwa, with Cecilia Vicuña, DAAR, Gabriele Goliath, Melati Suryodarmo, Thao Nguyen Phan, Thuma Collective and Yinka Shonibare among those named so far. Themed under the title In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, the biennial aims to embody ‘the joy of experiencing practices of divergent sensibilities, under conditions both joyful and grim’.
In Thailand, which has to date been remarkably successful in limiting the spread of COVID-19, plans for the second edition of the Bangkok Biennial, BB2020, have nonetheless been altered in response to the unpredictability of the pandemic. At the same time as organisers announced the opening of pavilion registration earlier this week, the biennial also set out a restructuring. In contrast to the first edition, which took place across the country over a three-month period in 2018, BB2020’s organisers have made the decision to extend a ‘horizontal decentralization’ into a temporal one, splitting the biennial into three time periods running from October 2020 to October 2021. Breaks between each of the three periods, of four or five months apiece, will presumably allow the biennial to respond to changing circumstances as needed.
EVA International, which has announced its full list of artists, is making similar adjustments to those planned in Thailand, dividing its activities into three phases across 2020–21. The Irish biennial, in its 39th edition, will open on 18 September, seeking ‘to address ideas of land and its contested values in the context of Ireland today’. The biennial will include a guest programme of artworks by some 20 artists and collectives, four research projects, five commissions of new work by artists based in Ireland – addressing variously land use, environmentalism and housing activism – and partnership projects with national and international organisations. Phase 1 of the biennial runs until 15 November in venues across Limerick city.
