Why Biennials Outside Capital Cities Matter

For much of the twentieth century, contemporary art followed a relatively fixed geography. A small number of capitals concentrated institutions, funding, and visibility, shaping not only what circulated, but how it was understood. To engage with contemporary art at scale was, more often than not, to move through those centers.

That map has been quietly, but steadily, redrawn.

Peter Buggenhout, PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century, 2024, exhibition view. Image taken from Frieze's page

The expansion of biennials over the past few decades has played a central role in this shift. As they have multiplied, they have increasingly taken root in cities that exist just outside those dominant circuits. Their presence there is not incidental. It reflects a broader reorientation of cultural attention, one that disperses rather than concentrates, and that allows different kinds of artistic ecosystems to become visible. What changes in these contexts is not only location, but the relationship between art and place.

In cities where institutional infrastructures are already dense, biennials tend to operate within established frameworks. Elsewhere, they are often shaped in closer dialogue with the conditions of the place itself. This can be seen in how certain biennials have developed identities that are inseparable from the histories they inhabit.

In Gwangju, for example, contemporary art is framed through a civic memory that remains active, the legacy of the 1980 democratization movement continuing to inform the biennial’s orientation. In Kochi, exhibitions unfold across sites marked by centuries of trade and colonial exchange, where the material fabric of the city is not a neutral backdrop but part of the experience of the work. And in Liverpool, the biennial disperses across the urban landscape, allowing the city’s architecture and social spaces to function as extensions of the exhibition rather than containers for it.

Outside capitals, the distance between artistic production and the conditions that shape it tends to narrow. The work is encountered not in isolation, but in relation to architecture, language, history, and everyday life. This does not necessarily make the experience more immediate, but it does make it more situated. The exhibition becomes less about presentation and more about articulation, a way of making visible relationships that are already present but not always legible.

Ibrahim Mahama, Parliament of Ghosts, 2019-present. Image taken from artsy.net

For institutions, this shift opens another way of engaging with place. It allows for encounters that are less mediated by established infrastructures and more closely tied to the environments in which artistic practices develop. At the same time, it introduces a different set of tensions. As attention moves, so do pressures. Increased visibility can reshape local economies, influence cultural production, and introduce expectations that do not always align with local priorities. The presence of a biennial, in itself, guarantees very little. What matters is the degree to which it is embedded within the place from which it emerges.

This distinction between embedding and imposition is crucial. The most compelling biennials outside capitals are not those that attempt to replicate the authority of larger centers, but those that work from the specific conditions already in place. They begin with what exists, rather than what is missing. They make visible a cultural landscape that has been forming over time, rather than introducing one from outside.

It is within this broader movement that a new biennial is set to take shape in Mérida, in the Mexican state of Yucatán.

Its emergence does not mark the arrival of contemporary art to the region. It reflects a moment in which a network of artists, independent spaces, and cultural initiatives has reached a level of density that can sustain a project of this scale. Over the past years, that network has become more visible through exhibitions, collaborations, and events that extend beyond the city itself, connecting Mérida to a wider territory that includes smaller towns, former industrial sites, and artist led spaces operating outside conventional institutional frameworks.

Yucatán is shaped by a cultural continuity that complicates any simple reading of the present. The historical presence of the Maya world remains active not only through archaeological sites, but through language, material practices, and forms of knowledge that continue to structure everyday life. Later histories, including the transformation of the peninsula through the henequen industry, have left their own imprint on the landscape, visible in both architecture and social organization. These layers do not sit in the past; they coexist with contemporary production, forming a dense field in which different temporalities remain in tension.

Sculpture by Nandan Ghiya interpreting the Samudra Manthana. Image taken from Open Eye Gallery's page

To encounter contemporary art within this setting is therefore to encounter it within a set of relationships that extend beyond the exhibition itself.

It is precisely this proximity that gives biennials outside capitals their particular significance. They do not simply extend the reach of contemporary art geographically. They alter the conditions under which it is experienced, allowing for forms of understanding that are less easily produced within more centralized systems.

Not every city requires a biennial, but when one emerges from a place that is already thinking, producing, and evolving, it can offer something that larger, more established contexts often cannot: a closer relationship between artistic practice and the conditions that shape it.