The Antarctic Biennale

The institutional condition of the Antarctic Biennale is unlike that of any other event listed in this directory. The Venice Biennale, the world's oldest, has run since 1895 across more than one hundred and twenty years of Italian institutional history; the São Paulo Bienal has run since 1951; documenta has run since 1955 on a five-year cadence anchored in Kassel; the Sydney Biennale, the Sharjah Biennial, the Gwangju Biennale and the Berlin Biennale all rest on continuing civic institutional commitments — a foundation, a building, an annual budget line, a staff. The Antarctic Biennale rests on no civic building, no continuing budget line, no national or municipal patron. It rests on the personal authority and continuing capacity of one artist — Alexander Ponomarev — to assemble the vessel, the financing, the curatorial team, the participant list, the regulatory and treaty permissions, and the operational programme that an Antarctic voyage requires. The 1st Antarctic Biennale, in March 2017, was the project's working demonstration that the assembly is possible. What it did not do was assemble itself a second time.

The biennial cadence that the institutional category called "the biennale" implies — the every-two-year working repetition that distinguishes biennale from one-off exhibition, that places the institution into a continuing relationship with its city and its public, that produces across decades the institutional record by which the institution is read — has not, in the case of the Antarctic Biennale, been achieved. The 2017 voyage was followed by an Antarctic Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in May 2017, which served as the post-expedition exhibition and as the project's continuing institutional argument in the principal European biennial venue. Since then the project's principal continuing institutional record has been the catalogue, the documentation, the website and the public-programme record of the 2017 voyage itself. No second voyage has sailed; no third has been confirmed; the biennial cadence has not, in the strict sense, materialised.

The institutional argument the absence makes

The honest institutional reading of the Antarctic Biennale, at this distance, is that it may be a one-edition project — a biennale whose framework is partly aspirational and partly historical, whose institutional achievement is the working demonstration of the 2017 voyage rather than the production of a continuing institutional commitment. The forces working against repetition are not curatorial but logistical and structural: the cost of chartering a polar-rated research vessel for twelve days, the regulatory clearances required by the Antarctic Treaty system and the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, the polar season window (the southern summer's narrow opening between November and March), the changing geopolitical conditions under which Russian-flagged vessels and Russian institutional partnerships now operate in the wake of the 2022 reordering of international institutional life, and the personal continuing capacity of one founding artist now in his late sixties to assemble the same operation a second time. The conditions that made the 1st Antarctic Biennale possible in March 2017 are not the conditions of the second half of the 2020s.

What the Antarctic Biennale does demonstrate — and this is the institutional argument the project continues to make even in the absence of a second voyage — is that the category of "the biennale" can be inhabited by an event that occurs once, leaves no trace, and rests on the documentation of itself rather than on the continuing operation of a civic institution. The institutional model is closer to that of an expedition than to that of an exhibition, and the historical analogues lie more in the polar exploration record of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Shackleton's Endurance, Amundsen and Scott's competing voyages of 1911–12, the post-war Antarctic research programmes that culminated in the Antarctic Treaty itself) than in the post-1895 history of the international art biennial. Ponomarev's biography as Soviet Navy submariner and continuing maritime artist places him within the polar exploration tradition more naturally than within the art-world institutional tradition, and the project he built was at least as much an expedition as it was a biennale.

The continuing question — whether a second edition will sail, whether the biennial cadence will be retrospectively achieved, whether the Antarctic Biennale will remain a single 2017 event or will reopen as a continuing institutional commitment — is the editorial question that the project's continuing record does not yet answer. The honest position, at the time of writing, is that the Antarctic Biennale is a biennale of one — one voyage, one edition, one working demonstration, one continuing argument that the category of biennale can be made to mean something other than what the civic biennials of Venice and São Paulo and Sydney have made it mean. Whether that argument is sustained by a second voyage or rests on the 2017 record alone is for the project's continuing record to determine.