This is the catalogue of the second edition of the Johannesburg Biennale in 1997, entitled 'Trade Routes: History and Geography', under the direction of artistic director Okwui Enwezor.
'Trade Routes: History and Geography is sited around the axial vector of economic globalisation. It is an attempt to elaborate the full measure of its debates, particularly those that rise out of the analysis of modernity as a circulatory system of exchange and site of translation, as transnational/cultural transactions that do not always arrive in neatly tied packages, as the South African-born British critic, Sarat Maharaj wonderfully put it. In this manner, all journeys are not only incomplete, they form part of the vast ways the world is encountered and translated. This project then comes at a time when the entire notion of history is being constantly questioned and revisited. Hence, the elaboration of the debates in which the Biennale is necessarily enmeshed, could be seen as a kind of open network involving different levels of cultural significations, translations, transcriptions, phenomenological and social encounters, mobility of ideas, contestations of political methodologies, etc.' - from Enwezor's introductory essay featured in the publication.
In total six exhibitions took place during the Biennale. The project ceased one month before the originally planned date due to the lack of funding from the city of Johannesburg. This second edition is also the last one of the Johannesburg Biennale.
Includes general essays, and curatorial essays for each exhibitions. Artists' biographies also included.
Please note that only Asian artists participating in the Biennale are listed.
'Trade Routes: History and Geography is sited around the axial vector of economic globalisation. It is an attempt to elaborate the full measure of its debates, particularly those that rise out of the analysis of modernity as a circulatory system of exchange and site of translation, as transnational/cultural transactions that do not always arrive in neatly tied packages, as the South African-born British critic, Sarat Maharaj wonderfully put it. In this manner, all journeys are not only incomplete, they form part of the vast ways the world is encountered and translated. This project then comes at a time when the entire notion of history is being constantly questioned and revisited. Hence, the elaboration of the debates in which the Biennale is necessarily enmeshed, could be seen as a kind of open network involving different levels of cultural significations, translations, transcriptions, phenomenological and social encounters, mobility of ideas, contestations of political methodologies, etc.' - from Enwezor's introductory essay featured in the publication.
In total six exhibitions took place during the Biennale. The project ceased one month before the originally planned date due to the lack of funding from the city of Johannesburg. This second edition is also the last one of the Johannesburg Biennale.
Includes general essays, and curatorial essays for each exhibitions. Artists' biographies also included.
Please note that only Asian artists participating in the Biennale are listed.
Alternative title
2nd Johannesburg Biennale 1997
Access level
Onsite
Location code
EX.SOA.JBB.1997
Language
English
Keyword
perennial exhibition,  globalisation,  mapping,  history,  space,  postcolonialism,  group exhibition
Publication/Creation date
1997
No of pages
412
ISBN / ISSN
0620215224
No of copies
1
Content type
catalogue
Chapter headings
Introduction
Introduction: Travel Notes: Living, Working, and Travelling in a Restless World - Okwui ENWEZOR
Essays
The Electronic Bottle: Dreaming of Global Art and Geographic Innocence - Francesco BONAMI
The Work of Art in the Time of War Destruction - Predrag FINCI
The Work Between Us - Jean FISHER
For the Transcultural Record - Paul GILROY
Leeward Slipface - Ashraf JAMAL
Cultural Production in Post-Apartheid South Africa - Clive KELLNER
Walking the Tightrope - David KOLOANE
Conflict - Sharing - Consensus - Complicity - and Back Again - Vasif KORTUN
By what Right are you a Foreigner? - Julia KRISTEVA
Contingency Plans - Hannah LE ROUX
Forsaken Geographies: Cyberspace and the New World 'Other' - Olu OGUIBE
The Pale and Beyond: Rethinking Art in a Reconstructed Society - Ivor POWELL
Whose City is it? Globalisation and the Formation of New Claims - SASSEN Saskia
Exhibitions
'Alternating Currents': Around Precarious Discursive Constructions - Octavio ZAYA
Graft - Colin RICHARDS
Important and Exportant - Gerardo MOSQUERA
Life's Little Necessities: Installations by Women in the 1990s - Kellie JONES
Hong Kong Etc. - HOU Hanru, 侯瀚如
Transversions - KIM Yuyeon, 김유연
Encounters: Film and Narrative Forms of Globalisation - Mahen BONETTI, Don WEBSTER
Museum on the Move: The Robert Walser Museum as a Migratory Museum - Hans Ulrich OBRIST
Trade Routes: History + Geography

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