Paloma Checa-Gismero's "Biennial Boom" delves into the history and geography of art biennials, exploring their role in shaping global contemporary art. The book examines how these events have re-evaluated, re-contextualized, and re-animated objects, designating them as art. Checa-Gismero analyzes the transformations of subaltern aesthetic genealogies into forms accessible to a global elite. The work offers a critical perspective on the processes involved in defining and valuing art within a globalized context. It also highlights the labor and power dynamics inherent in these processes.
Paloma Checa-Gismero talks about the many processes of re-evaluation, re-contextualization, and re-animation that designates an object as art. To illustrate this point, she calls our attention to the work of artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles in the 1970s, or the 1989 exhibition titled Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She develops the concept of aesthetic conversions in her new book about the histories and geographies of art biennials, which, in the post cold war world, converted subaltern aesthetic genealogies into forms that were legible to a nascent cosmopolitan global elite.
Paloma Checa-Gismero is a historian of global contemporary art. She is Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College. Originally trained as an artist, she has been an active art critic since 2009. Her scholarship and criticism have been published in Afterall, FIELD, Third Text, The Journal of Modern Craft, among others. She is the author of Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global (Duke University Press, 2024).
Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu. It is a tilted and warped version of the capital letter B that spills out of the frame, its three parts in maroon, violet, and deep green, against a yellow ochre background.
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New Books in Art