Curated by: Catherine David

Some people would like to persuade us of the benefits of economic globalisation in terms of cultural and artistic exchanges, thanks primarily to a more rapid circulation of information, works and ideas. A clearer and more critical look at today’s world, however, soon reveals that opacity is more powerful than transparency and that there are still a great many ‘grey areas’ (1) on the political and legal map. Similarly, the relatively recent arrival on the international ‘contemporary art’ scene and market of a certain number of artists from non-European and/or non-Western countries must not allow us to conceal the reality of the extremely precarious socio-economic and cultural situations that still stand as so many obstacles in the path and to the visibility of artists in many parts of the world. This is why it is so important to multiply, as the Thessaloniki Biennale has set out to do, the opportunities for presenting and discussing the aesthetic productions of these regions, in dialogue with the work of artists from more “privileged” environments, whose activity, however, may not necessarily be the most visible or the most talked about in what is seen as the mainstream of contemporary art. To me, in fact, it seems necessary to abandon the now obsolete opposition of ‘centre/periphery’ for a more complex and more polemical aesthetic and political cartography in which it would be possible to identify certain significant echoes in works formally very diverse by artists who are currently proposing, in very different contexts and with equally different tools, a new ‘distribution of the sensible’. (2)

(1) Achille Mbembe
(2) Jacques Rancière

Catherine David