This innovative new history examines in-depth how the growing popularity of large-scale international survey exhibitions, or “biennials”, has influenced global contemporary art since the 1950s.

• Provides a comprehensive global history of biennialization from the rise of the European star-curator in the 1970s to the emergence of mega-exhibitions in Asia in the 1990s
• Introduces a global array of case studies to illustrate the trajectory of biennials and their growing influence on artistic expression, from the Biennale de la Méditerranée in Alexandria, Egypt in 1955, the second Havana Biennial of 1986, New York’s Whitney Biennial in 1993, and the 2002 Documenta11 in Kassel, to the Gwangju Biennale of 2014
• Explores the evolving curatorial approaches to biennials, including analysis of the roles of sponsors, philanthropists and biennial directors and their re-shaping of the contemporary art scene
• Uses the history of biennials as a means of illustrating and inciting further discussions of globalization in contemporary art

CHARLES GREEN is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (2001) and Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-94 (1995) and co-author of Framing Conflict: War, Peace and Aftermath(2014, with L. Brown and J. Cattapan). As Adjunct Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria he co-curated Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968-2002 (2002), world rush_4 artists (2003), 2004: Australian Visual Culture Now (ACMI/NGVA, 2004), and 2006: Contemporary Commonwealth (ACMI/NGVA, 2006). Green is also an artist working in collaboration with Lyndell Brown since 1989.

ANTHONY GARDNER is Associate Professor in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art Against Democracy (2015), the editor of Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations (2013) and a co-editor of the journal ArtMargins.