Biennale, Italian for "biennial" or "every other year", is any event that happens every two years. It is most commonly used within the art world to describe large-scale international contemporary art exhibitions. As such the term was popularised by Venice Biennale, which was first held in 1895. The phrase has since been used for other artistic events, such as the "Biennale de Paris", "Kochi-Muziris Biennale", or even as a portmanteau as with Berlinale and Viennale. "Biennale" is therefore used as a general term for other recurrent international events.
Zhang Xiaogang is a contemporary Chinese symbolist and surrealist painter. Paintings in his Bloodline series are predominantly monochromatic, stylized portraits of Chinese people, usually with large, dark-pupiled eyes, posed in a stiff manner deliberately reminiscent of family portraits from the 1950s and 1960s. Recently, he also created sculptures, translating for the first time into three dimensions many characters of the sort seen in his "Bloodlines—Big Family" portrait series. These sculptures have featured in many exhibits and continue his work as one of China's leading, and most highly sought-after, contemporary artists.
Miao Xiaochun is an artist and photographer based in Beijing.
Sal Randolph is an American artist and theorist who works with issues of gift-giving, money, alternate economies, and social architecture. She founded the non-curated sound-exchange web project Opsound, which functions through the use of music released exclusively under a copyleft license, and has been cited by Lawrence Lessig as an example of how Creative Commons works to enable artists to collaborate more freely and build on each other's work. Other large-scale, collaborative projects created and implemented by Randolph include Free Manifesta and The Free Biennial, in which several hundred artists presented their work in free and open shows in New York's and Frankfurt am Main's public spaces. Artists participating in those projects included Christophe Bruno, Aram Saroyan, Swoon (artist), and Michael Cunningham, among many others.
San Yuan Li is a 2003 experimental independent Chinese documentary directed and produced by artists Ou Ning and Cao Fei. Focusing on the modern paradox of China's rapid economic growth and social marginalization, the film was shot in San Yuan Li, a rural village nestled in the industrial skyline of Guangzhou. The film examines the effects of development on traditional agrarian lifestyles. San Yuan Li was commissioned for and exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2003.
Asia Art Archive (AAA) is a nonprofit organisation based in Hong Kong which focuses on documenting the recent history of contemporary art in Asia within an international context. AAA incorporates material that members of local art communities find relevant to the field, and provides educational and public programming. In 2016, AAA is one of the most comprehensive publicly accessible collections of research materials in the field, and has initiated about 150 public, educational, and residential programmes.
Gerard Byrne is an Irish artist. He works primarily in film, video and photography in large-scale installations which reconstruct imagery found in magazine published in the 1970s through the 1980s.
Haegue Yang (Korean: 양혜규) is a South Korean artist. She lives and works in Berlin and Seoul. Yang often uses standard household objects in her works, and tries to liberate them from their functional context, and apply other connotations and meaning to them. “Linguistic and didactic processes” are central features of her work. Much of Yang’s artworks attempt to provide sensory experiences through abstract narratives.
Andreja Kulunčić is a contemporary Croatian artist, living and working in Zagreb, Croatia.
Lee Kit is a contemporary artist who currently lives and works in Hong Kong and Taipei. Lee's practice spans a broad range of media including painting, drawing, video, and installation. Best known for his works with hand-painted cloth, Lee’s works often focus on quotidian and ready-made objects that address ordinary daily rituals. He won the Art Futures Award in the Hong Kong Art Fair in 2012. Lee was selected as the representative artist for Hong Kong's participation at the Venice Biennale, the 55th International Art Exhibition, in 2013.
The Maldives Pavilion represents the Republic of the Maldives at the International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia among the National Pavilions. The inaugural Pavilion was introduced in 2013 for the 55th Venice Biennale, curated by Massimiliano Gioni. The Commissioner of the Pavilion is The Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture of Republic of the Maldives. The inaugural pavilion explored the themes of ecological romanticism and climate crisis.
Wooloo is a Danish artist collective founded by Sixten Kai Nielsen, Russell Ratshin, and Martin Rosengaard.
Kimsooja is a South Korean, multi-disciplinary conceptual artist based in New York, Paris, and Seoul. Her practice combines performance, film, photo, and site-specific installation using textile, light, and sound. Kimsooja's work investigates questions concerning the conditions of humanity, while engaging issues of aesthetics, culture, politics, and the environment. Her principle of ‘non-doing’ and ‘non-making,’ which follows a conceptual and structural investigation of performance through modes of mobility and immobility, inverts the notion of the artist as the predominant actor.
Kirsten Dufour is a Danish visual artist. She works with performance as well as other mediums to bring attention to social injustices. Dufour was co-curator of the 2004 interdisciplinary exhibition Minority Report: Challenging Intolerance in Contemporary Denmark. She currently lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Rheim Alkadhi is a visual artist based in Berlin who works internationally. Alkadhi operates under contemporary conditions in alternating geographical contexts, circumscribed by objects, images, and texts, via digital media, interactions in public space, and intimate person-to-person contact. Her work is described as:"With multiple migratory belongings/trajectories in regions of imposed geopolitical conflict, the perception of authoritarian, imperial, colonial dominance is magnified in everyday life. Thus, the work registers a nonconforming emancipatory feminist existence under such planetary conditions, using mediums of language, artifacts of material reality, and living interactions."
N. S. Harsha is an Indian contemporary artist from Mysore. He works in many media including painting, sculpture, site-specific installation, and public works.
Ayşe Erkmen is a visual artist recognized as the "one of the foremost Turkish artists." She is living and working in Berlin and in Istanbul.
Lydia Ourahmane is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Algiers. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Ca' Pesaro, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Manifesta, Kunstverien München. The New Museum, the Chisenhale Gallery, the Istanbul Modern the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the World Museum and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.
Duan Jianyu is a visual artist. She graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. She currently teaches at the Fine Arts Department of South China Normal University. Duan works and lives in Guangzhou. The style of Duan Jianyu’s paintings tend to start out with everyday reality, and then midway through fade out and slip slowly into the world of the mind. This kind of narrative technique appears consistently in the artist’s creations. Duan Jianyu’s large-scale paintings present incongruous scenarios drawing on a wide range of sources from European art history, classical Chinese painting, and imagery of traditional rural life. She has also created multi-media installations, artist’s books, photographs, and ink paintings on cardboard. In her work, European nudes, Chinese landscapes, chickens, watermelons and air hostesses come together to explore with wry humor the clashes between urban and rural, tradition and modernity in a society undergoing enormous change.
Sofie Hesselholdt and Vibeke Mejlvang are a collaborative duo of visual artists who live and work in Copenhagen. They started collaborating in late 1999 and work with performance art and site-specific installations in public spaces addressing social and political topics such as National Identity and Eurocentrism.
