The Defining Themes Of Today's Biennial Art

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Biennials have a way of turning scattered artistic practices into a visible pattern. After analyzing 130 biennials from the last four years, Ben Davis has identified a cluster of artists whose work keeps returning to a few charged subjects: colonial history, family memory, resource extraction, and forms of repair.

The artists who appeared in nine or more of the biennials Davis studied include Ali Eyal, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Carolina Caycedo, Christian Nyampeta, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Jumana Manna, Kader Attia, Kapwani Kiwanga, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Monira Al Qadiri, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Raven Chacon, Saodat Ismailova, Sammy Baloji, Seba Calfuqueo, Sky Hopinka, Tabita Rezaire, Tarek Atoui, Torkwase Dyson, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Eight of those artists also appear in“In Minor Keys,” the exhibition curated by the late South African curator Koyo Kouoh for the 61st Venice Biennale.

That overlap is revealing. It suggests that the most visible work on the biennial circuit is not simply formal or aesthetic, but often archival, political, and quietly investigative. Davis groups much of it under a post-colonial, post-conceptual mode: artists surface documents, symbols, or materials tied to colonial violence, then transform them through gestures that are reflective rather than overtly didactic.

Nolan Oswald Dennis's g arden for fanon (2021) is one example. The work uses globular glass containers filled with earthworms, which are fed pages from Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, turning theory into soil. Kapwani Kiwanga's Flowers for Africa (2013–ongoing) recreates historic flower and plant arrangements from African liberation ceremonies, then lets them wilt. Tuan Andrew Nguyen has made sculptural mobiles from leftover Vietnam War bombs, while Sammy Baloji has turned shell casings into planters.

The same logic extends to alternative histories and speculative narratives. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's The Lebanese Rocket Society and Kiluanji Kia Henda's Icarus 13: The First Journey to the Sun both revisit the space race through Third World politics. Monira Al Qadiri's sculptures take the form of drill bits for oil rigs, while Dennis's isivivane (2023–ongoing) uses 3-D printed rock samples extracted for Western geological museums as a symbolic act of reclamation.

Family history is another recurring thread. Sky Hopinka's Kicking the Clouds draws on audio of his grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother. Kader Attia's The Forgotten Suitcase involved unpacking a suitcase that belonged to his mother. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme have incorporated drawings by Abou-Rahme's father from 1970s Jerusalem.

Taken together, these works suggest that today's biennial circuit is rewarding art that treats history as something to be handled, sounded, planted, or reassembled - not merely represented.

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