Embassies of resistance: The 20th Biennale of Sydney

It is hard not to think of the biennale form as being under siege by the more nimble if somewhat scattergun approach of the art fair in the twenty-first century. It may have been in decades past that biennales took the pulse of the latest developments in contemporary art from one or more regions in the world. It is, however, increasingly evident that the twenty-first century biennale has to premise itself on anthological structures that frequently mine the heritage of modernist experimentation and at times revisit particular moments in contemporary production to posit new propositions about the nature of the world