Tomasz Wendland on the fight against biennale standardization

The most striking speech at the Yekaterinburg meeting of the IBA (International Biennial Association) was the romantic and rebellious speech by the director of the Mediations Biennale in Poznan, Tomasz Wendland, who called for a fight against institutional inertia and standardization of the biennale. Anna Tolstova asked the artist and curator Tomasz Wendland about the meaning and purpose of the biennale

What is the difference between the biennale and any other periodic exhibition of contemporary art?

First of all, all biennials are somewhat different from each other. The only thing they have in common is that it is a long-term commitment to do something every two years. And this is in a sense a miracle, because when you announce your intention to organize a biennale, everyone begins to take the work more seriously. Personally, I have no use for the word “biennale,” but it makes an impression on the authorities and sponsors: it sounds like something international, which means we are like everyone else. But everyone can't be like everyone else.

But many biennales really copy each other.

Unfortunately, I agree with you. And my biennale is also partly copied: I tried to borrow from others what seemed relevant to the current situation in Poland and project it onto my project. And at the same time, it is impossible to copy any biennale completely - local peculiarities dictate certain restrictions. It seems to me that the IBA should give professionals who have already done biennales several times the opportunity to stop and think about how to improve their biennales - not to standardize them, but to emphasize their uniqueness.

It is considered good form that a biennale should work with the local context. But if all biennials deal with local contexts, then they will essentially become the same.

But if you do something completely different from the local context, you have the right to do so, because even in your denial you take this context into account, based on knowledge about it. As you travel around the world and watch different biennales, you begin to understand what the advantage of your position is - at that moment you become a professional. For example, what struck me in Yekaterinburg were the trams. In Poland, our trams are standard, there are no advertisements, but here they are all different and each one is a work of art. And I thought, why are you doing an indoor biennale when you have so many trams - these are mobile exhibition halls. The tram is a public place, which means you are guaranteed an audience: they still have nothing to occupy themselves with on the way - they are yours. If I had money, I would buy an Ekaterinburg tram and take it around Polish cities as an advertisement for the Ural Biennale - the tram itself, as an amazing object perceived by all senses, would be a better advertisement for Ekaterinburg than any texts.

There is an opinion that biennales in general are not made for the general public, but for artists and art industry professionals. Who do you think the biennale is for?

The Biennale is an international research seminar: you bring together visual and sensory researchers from all over the world, working with sounds, smells, tactile sensations. And these international meetings inspire people to break down stereotypes about other cultures and become more aware of the dignity of their own. In the old fashioned way, we imagine modern artists as some kind of crazy and incomprehensible visionaries who have left the world, but nowadays artists, using various media, study and express things that are directly related to life. Modern art is not the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, it's more like chewing gum stuck on a window. It's simple.

Local authorities often hope that the biennale will attract tourists to their city. But it is known that there is a special biennale tourism - the professional public comes to the biennale and sees nothing but it. Do biennials have an economic impact?

They can give, but it is not expressed in simple growth indicators. Frankly, I would hardly be able to afford to come to Yekaterinburg for five days just to see what kind of local artists there are. And the Biennale in Yekaterinburg is a good reason to come here. But I think that for you, Russians, this is even more important: you flew from Moscow to understand here that Yekaterinburg is part of your homeland, your culture and modern life, and not just some industrial metropolis on the map of the Urals. This is a precious feeling. It is impossible to translate everything into the language of financial gain. This way we can go far. It's much cheaper to kill sick people than to treat them, isn't it? Who said art has to make money? In the people who make the Yekaterinburg Biennale, a sense of pride in their homeland is combined with a sense of involvement in the problems of the big world: we participate in the discussion and study of these big world problems, so that we can then return to our local and everyday ones - this is also the value of culture, which is not measured money. Culture costs money, but does not produce money - pleasure is an important part of our life, we cannot work and earn all the time, we have to spend. You can’t say: we will finance a biennale only if it brings in money.

A good slogan for a fundraising campaign. It is believed that artists are divided into “biennial” and “non-biennial”. They say that it is indecent to invite Damien Hirst to the Biennale, because, you see, he is a commercial artist. Do you have any internal restrictions: this artist should not be invited?

Personally, I don't. But there are limitations all around: there is an art market, it has its own motivations and its own ideas about values, it doesn’t care about the biennale, because it is an alternative and it does not generate income. Some of the “market” artists want recognition, so they participate in the biennale, but for the biennale they do one thing, and for the market they do something completely different. These are two parallel worlds in art. But there are other parallel worlds, at least here in Poland. There are artists associated with academies, professors, teachers, they seem to have received something like a license to be an artist. And there are artists who are in no way connected with academies, who are kind of homeless from the point of view of academies; they are second-class artists or not artists at all. And even though I belong to the “academics,” I try to fight these prejudices, if only because there are much more “homeless” people—people without special education, with a design education, or who simply dropped out of the profession for a long time after studying—than there are “academics.” . But at biennales, artists from academies often do not want to exhibit together with those who do not have a diploma and who they consider insufficiently professional. Meanwhile, it is their work that is sometimes the most interesting. For me, as a curator, a biennale is an opportunity to find, rediscover or promote an unknown artist.

In my opinion, the best Moscow Biennale was the Catherine de Zegher Biennale, but the critics greeted it coolly: some lacked “big names”, others lacked fashionable radicals. Should a biennale have star artists?

Subconsciously you understand that it is nice to invite recognized and famous artists. However, this does not necessarily meet the objectives of your research. We showed Michelangelo Pistoletto and Bill Viola, but we really needed them. At the same time, we exhibited completely unknown artists, and everyone was amazed at the quality of their work. Of course, whenever you book a superstar, you run the risk of being told that you wasted a lot of money instead of supporting young talent. But sometimes this has a pedagogical effect: for young participants in the biennale, communication with the masters can be priceless.

In Russia, there is a similar situation with artist unions and academies, which form parallel worlds with their own ideas about professionalism; this is a Soviet legacy. But I have been to many non-metropolitan biennials and annual festivals in various Russian regions, and it seems to me that the best of them serve as a kind of alternative academies for young artists. Maybe the point of the biennale is to replace outdated academies?

Yes, I agree, the biennale has enormous educational potential. These are condensed academies: in two months in Yekaterinburg you can meet as many artists, curators, critics from all over the world as, without the biennale, you would not have gotten here in a century. You will not learn in five years in an academic classroom what you learn on the fly in a few days here.

Tell us about your Mediations Biennale in Poznań. How do you work on it, what goals do you set?

I try to make the biennale an open question and that everything will be like the first time. Of course, when we exhibit Bill Viola, it is not news either for him or for America, but it is news for the Polish art scene. In my opinion, biennales should not illustrate modernity, they should provoke it - this is especially important when you are doing an international project, where different views and worldviews collide: you invite a person from New Zealand - and he brings with him a different sense of being. The process of working on the biennale is divided into three stages: the first is the development of the concept in the curatorial group, research, search for artists, the second is the opening day, the third and most important is the analysis of the reaction of the public, critics, and artists, which begins literally on the second day of the exhibition. Analysis of what did not work, why it did not work, why the work in the catalog does not look the same as in the exhibition hall, and so on - for me this is not the end of the research, but precisely its true beginning. I organize biennials not only in Poznan, but also in Georgia and Germany, and for me thinking about the mistakes and successes of certain projects is a constant job. You can’t say that you opened a biennale, closed the door behind you and started working on the next one from scratch.

Did you stop being an artist when you started curating the biennale, or is curating a form of art for you?

Of course, curating is an art. Some of my exhibitions relate to what I did as an artist, and in such cases it is very difficult to prevent myself from participating in them as an artist. All the artists participate in the conversation, and you force yourself to remain silent and play the role of a passive spectator or, even worse, a kind of bureaucrat with financial reports - sign here, please. But you can look at it from the other side: a biennale is like a symphony, a hundred orchestra members have gathered, and you are their conductor and you hear one wonderful melody.

“I personally don’t need the word “biennale”, but it makes an impression on the authorities and sponsors”