Global Contemporary Art

Gülsün Karamustafa’s Resimli Tarih (Illustrated History) is a hand-sewn collage seven metres long, shaped like a caftan, the robe that signalled power and wealth under the Ottoman Empire. Its fabrics are cheap: synthetic velvet, scraps of kitsch wall hangings and silks bought for little on the streets of Istanbul, stitched around miniature portraits of sultans. The Fundação Bienal de São Paulo reads it as a response to the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union, an informal archaeology of one fallen empire made while another was collapsing. Karamustafa had been convicted in 1969 of hiding a political fugitive in her home, and her passport was cancelled until 1987.

A work like that, by a Turkish artist, discussed by a Brazilian foundation, for an audience anywhere, is a fair picture of the field this section covers. In our usage, “global contemporary art” means art made and shown across many centres at once, rather than in one Western capital and its outposts.

The exhibition as a world map

The large recurring exhibition is the main instrument of this change, and it is older than it looks. La Biennale di Venezia held its first International Art Exhibition in 1895. In the 1930s it added festivals of music, cinema and theatre, and its film festival of 1932 was the first anywhere. An International Architecture Exhibition followed in 1980. The art exhibition drew more than 800,000 visitors in 2022.

The Bienal de São Paulo held its first edition in 1951 and has since reached its thirty-sixth. Recent commissions there include Antonio Társis’s catástrofe orquestra #1 (Ato I), an orchestra of charcoal pendulums and drums with panels made from recycled matchboxes, now touring with the Bienal’s travelling exhibition in Chile.

documenta and the role of the curator

documenta in Kassel began in 1955, when the painter and academy professor Arnold Bode set out to reconnect postwar Germany with international art. The exhibition became a measure of its moment, and from 1972, when Harald Szeemann directed documenta 5, the curator’s own vision became part of the story. A committee now appoints a new artistic director for each edition. The list traces the field’s widening reach: Catherine David for documenta 10 in 1997, Okwui Enwezor for documenta 11 in 2002, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in 2012, Adam Szymczyk in 2017, and in 2022 the collective ruangrupa. Naomi Beckwith is directing documenta 16, due in 2027.

Museums on new ground

Biennials come and go; museums stay. In Cape Town, Zeitz MOCAA collects, exhibits and researches contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. Its home is a 1920s grain silo converted by Heatherwick Studio, with an atrium carved into a shape inspired by a single grain of corn. The museum runs a centre for art education and studio space for emerging Cape Town artists, so that art is made and studied there as well as shown.

What to watch for

Global art writing has its own clichés: the artist as cultural ambassador, the biennial as a passport stamp. The articles below try to resist them. They look at what particular artists make, which institutions support them, and how meaning shifts when a work travels from Istanbul to São Paulo, or from a studio to a pavilion in Venice.