Casablanca Biennale

Across the African biennial landscape the principal organising authority is, with rare exceptions, the state. Dak'Art is a Senegalese state biennial; the Cairo Biennale is an Egyptian state biennial; the Bamako Encounters operate under the Malian Ministry of Culture in partnership with the Institut français. The Biennale Internationale de Casablanca sits outside this institutional pattern. It was founded in 2012 by the Moroccan photographer Mostapha Romli as an independent curatorial platform, and since 2014 has operated under the aegis of the Maroc Premium Foundation — a private Moroccan cultural foundation Romli also founded. The continuing institutional fact about the Casablanca Biennale is that it is an artist-association-led biennial in a country whose state contemporary art infrastructure remains, by international comparison, underdeveloped.

The structural argument this institutional form makes is consequential. The Casablanca Biennale operates without the cultural-diplomacy partnerships that produce both the funding and the curatorial geometry of most African biennials — without the Institut français anchoring, without the European foundation philanthropy at Marrakech Biennale scale, without the cultural-ministry coordination that produces Dak'Art's biennial rhythm. What it has instead is the institutional architecture of an artist-founded association, with the curatorial freedom and the institutional precarity that arrangement entails. The South-South curatorial frame the biennial has programmed across five editions — and the choice of Christine Eyene as Artistic Director for the 4th and 5th editions — is intelligible only against the structural fact that the institutional authority programming the biennial is the founding artist and the small association around him, not a ministry, not a foundation board with a permanent executive, not a state cultural apparatus.

The 2018 edition registered the cost of this institutional form. Siddhartha Mitter's Artforum diary of the 4th Biennale opening reported that fifteen of the thirty-five participating artists signed a letter to the organisers enumerating poor communication, late travel bookings, missing per diems and uncovered costs, and no installation assistance — the operational difficulties characteristic of a biennial programmed at international ambition through association infrastructure rather than ministry-scale logistics. The episode is structurally instructive: the curatorial argument of the 4th edition was internationally credible (Eyene's Tales from the Water Margins attracted strong submissions and the review's substantive readings were of the artists' work) but the institutional architecture supporting the artists during the opening was not at the scale the curatorial ambition required.

That Casablanca — Morocco's economic and most populous city — has anchored the biennial rather than Marrakech is itself a structural argument. Marrakech is Morocco's cultural-tourism capital and was the site, until 2016, of the Marrakech Biennale (paused indefinitely after the 2017–2018 Foundation crisis). The Casablanca Biennale's continuing operation in Morocco's commercial capital, through year-round programming at the BIC Project Space opened in 2019, makes a different institutional argument from the Marrakech model: that a Moroccan biennial does not require the cultural-tourism economy of Marrakech, the philanthropic-foundation architecture of the Branson–Kabbaj generation, or the international art-world cultural infrastructure that the Marrakech Biennale Foundation assembled across its six editions. Whether the artist-association biennial model produces the institutional durability the state-anchored or foundation-anchored models have offered is the continuing structural question of the Casablanca Biennale's institutional history.