Mark your calendars, folks, it’s about to be another busy 12 months in the art world.
Although 2022 was a banner year for these major events, with the triple threat of the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, and Documenta, this year is shaping up to be chock full of the agenda-setting exhibitions that have become an entire ecosystem unto themselves. (For a deep dive on biennial culture, from the most prolific artists that participate in them to the galleries that represent those artists, plus how the ambitious projects get funded in the first place, check out Artnet News’s full Biennial Artist Project.)
Details for the forthcoming events are still trickling in, so we’ll keep this list updated as we get more information.
Hajj Terminal of King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Photo: Karim Sahib/AFP via Getty Images.
This is the inaugural edition of the biennial which sets out to celebrate contemporary art and historical artifacts of Muslims around the world. Situated at the historic Hajj Terminal in Jeddah, the biennial is helmed by a team that includes Sumayya Vally, the cofounder and principal of architecture firm Counterspace, which was invited to design the Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2021.
Installation view of Joe Namy’s Libretto-o-o at the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, façade of the Sharjah Art Museum, Arts Square, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Titled “Thinking Historically in the Present,” the 15th edition of the Sharjah Biennial was developed by the late curator Okwui Enwezor, and is curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, the director of the Sharjah Art Foundation. Before his death, Enwezor proposed the idea of commissioning 30 artworks to celebrate the biennial’s 30-year anniversary, and artists including John Akomfrah, Coco Fusco, Mona Hatoum, Doris Salcedo, and Kerry James Marshall have done just that. The show will take place across 16 venues in the emirate of Sharjah and will feature more than 150 artists from 70 countries.
Xaviera Simmons, Because You Know Ultimately We Will Band A Militia, (2021). Desert X installation view, Palm Springs, CA. Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo.
The 2023 edition of Desert X in California’s Coachella Valley will focus on water—and the lack of it—in the arid landscape of the desert and beyond amid global climate change. Per the press release, “Our structures in the survival of these extremes speak not just to the physical adaptations of climate, but to the social formations that give form to a world increasingly shaped by climate crisis and the political and economic migrations that follow in its wake.”
A visitor looking at the art installation “Outi Pieski” by Eeva-Kristiina Harlin during a preview of the 13th Gwangju Biennale on March 31, 2021. Photo: Jung Yeon-je/AFP via Getty Images.
For its 14th edition, the South Korea-based Gwangju Biennale is curated by Tate Modern chief curator Sook-Kyung Lee and titled “Soft and tender like water,” based on the philosophies in Laozi’s The Tao Te Ching. Some 80 international artists will participate in the event, which is organized around four themes: “Luminous Halo,” “Ancestral Voices,” “Transient Sovereignty,” and “Planetary Times.”
Lesley Lokko, curator of the 18th Architecture Biennale.
Curated by Lesley Lokko, founder and director of the Accra, Ghana-based African Futures Institute, the theme of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition will be “The Laboratory of the Future.” In a statement, Lokko explained that “Africa is the laboratory of the future” as the world’s youngest continent to undergo rapid urbanization, and one that must adapt and react to climate change on local and global scales. Lokko also noted that the exhibition itself is a laboratory of the future, “a time and space in which questions are asked about the relevance of the discipline for this world, and for the one to come.”
The forthcoming 12th edition of the Liverpool Biennial is titled “uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things” from the isiZulu language, in which uMoya means spirit, breath, air, climate, and wind. More than 30 artists and collectives will participate in the event, curated by the Cape Town-based artist and sociologist Khaniyisile Mbongwa.
For the 2023 edition of the Helsinki Biennial, titled “New Directions May Emerge,” curator Joasia Krysa invited five artists and collectives to collaborate on the event, which will take place at venues around the city, on Vallisaari Island, and at the HAM Helsinki Art Museum. The five entities include the Museum of Impossible Forms; TBA21-Academy; Critical Environmental Data; and Visual Cultures, Curating, and Contemporary Art (viCCA).
Although the dates for the upcoming event are still to be determined, the show is organized around the theme “choreographies of the impossible.” The curatorial team of Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes, and Manuel Borja-Villel penned a text outlining the ideas, writing: “As the title already suggests, it is an invitation to radical imaginations about the unknown, or even about what figures as im/possible.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
