Biennials/Triennials: Conversations on the Geography of Itinerant Display

In the forty years since the first iteration of Venice Architecture Biennale, the field of architecture has seen a remarkable change in the role played by exhibition-making. While architecture and display have long been intertwined practices, a rapid proliferation of large-scale perennial exhibitions―particularly in the twenty-first century―has resulted in the biennial / triennial becoming an integral part of our discipline, a new geography of itinerant display that has profoundly altered the contours of architectural thought. Between format, space, and content, what are the various agencies and effects of these events? Biennials / Triennials asks these questions and others of a range of curatorial agents―including After Belonging Agency, Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Sarah Herda, Adrian Lahoud, Ippolito Pestellini, and Andre Tavares―and visits crucial sites of recent exhibitions that reveal what is at stake in the newfound ubiquity of the architectural –ennial.

Léa-Catherine Szacka is a lecturer in architectural studies at the Manchester Architecture Research Group (MARg), University of Manchester, and is the author of Exhibiting the Postmodern: The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale (Marsilio, 2016, winner of the SAHGB’s Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion).