The globalization of art and the ‘Biennials of Resistance’: a history of the biennials from the periphery

More than any other institution in the art field, biennials mediate the local, national and transnational. In this sense, biennials can be called ‘hegemonic machines’ that link the local to the global within the field of symbolic struggles for legitimation. In this article, a brief genealogy is presented to show how anti- and postcolonial biennials have contributed to the artistic decentralization of the West. From this history, we may conclude that the global history of the future is being written from today's periphery. Not only is the power of definition held by the West, which imagined itself as the centre of world affairs, waning; but we are slowly beginning to understand that, as in the case of the history of biennials, the so-called ‘periphery’ anticipated developments that would later be of great significance to the centre.