Guest editors: Dária Jaremtchuk and Camila Maroja

This special issue of OBOE brings together a series of case studies on the Bienal de São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil) by an international team of scholars. The articles offer new ways of understanding the complexities of this southern biennial and of questioning its position within the larger history of perennial exhibitions. From in-depth analyses of the Biennial’s award-winning artists and of its acquisition awards that today constitute the archive of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP), to examinations of specific national representations and important editions, the research presented here is not only relevant to the field of art history with its current focus on exhibition histories and the expansion of the canon beyond US-Europe, but also to scholarship and research in Latin American art and exhibition histories more generally.

Contributors: Renata Dias Ferraretto Moura Rocco, Emerson Dionisio Gomes de Oliveira, Dária Jaremtchuk, Ana Magalhães, Camila Maroja, Marina Mazze Cerchiaro, Maria de Fátima Morethy Couto, Bruno Pinheiro, Glaucia Villas Bôas.

Guest editor: Jennifer Noonan

Prints, multiples, artist’s books, posters, printed ephemera, etc., have been exhibited alongside paintings and sculptures in international, large-scale exhibitions. They have been displayed in, sold, and collected from the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennial, Documenta and several other perennial exhibitions. Regardless of their continuous, vital presence within international venues and despite the proliferation of scholarship on biennials, there have been few studies on the role of prints and artist’s editions within these exhibitions. The texts collected in this third issue aim at opening art historical narratives towards a sometimes marginalised medium, which has been in many cases vital for the life and fortune of large-scale exhibitions: cultural tourism, dissemination of the avant-garde, bourgeois collections’, taste-making, democratisation of art, institutional critique as well as politics. 

Contributors: Maeve Coudrelle, Alessia Del Bianco, Adelaide Duarte and Lígia Afonso, Jacob Lund, Jennifer Noonan, Camilla Pietrabissa.

What is the germinal cell of an exhibition, or rather of any exhibition event? OBOE Journal’s second issue departs from this question to investigate art’s fanìa (the Greek term for appearance) and the multiple ways in which art offers itself to the audience. As language, art is an instrument for exchange and an opportunity for the intertwining of two poles, that of the artists–those who make the art—and of the viewers, those who receive it and engage with it.

The articles and reflections presented in our new “Echoes” column open up a vast discourse on the phenomenology of how an artwork presents itself, on perception and the role of the audience, and on contemporary art’s exhibiting practices and conditions.

Contributors: Mónica Amor, Lorenzo Balbi, Arnon Ben-Dror, Marco Bertozzi, Jens Hoffmann, Miriam La Rosa, Emanuele Rinaldo Meschini

OBOE Journal On Biennials and Other Exhibitions launches its first issue with a focus on the Venice Biennale. Born in 1895, the Venice exhibition, although the criticism for its limitations, is still one of the most significant and defining events of the contemporary art calendar. Many are the studies devoted to the Venice Biennale, but many are the gaps and fallacies that remain around the analysis of this exhibition. Attending to some of these oversights in Why Venice? remains critically important, and not just because this is our first issue, but primarily because it intends to answer something we felt was fundamental.

Contributors: Caroline A. Jones, Maria Mimita Lamberti, Vittoria Martini, Clarissa Ricci, Camilla Salvaneschi, Martina Tanga, Angela Vettese.