The Bienal del Fin del Mundo

The Bienal del Fin del Mundo — the Biennial of the End of the World, or, in the institution's standing English form, the End of the World Biennial — is the contemporary art biennial of Ushuaia, capital of Argentina's Tierra del Fuego Province and the world's southernmost permanent city. The founding edition opened on 30 March 2007 and ran through 29 April, presented by the Fundación Patagonia Arte y Desafío together with the Memorial Foundation of the Parlamento Latinoamericano of São Paulo, as Argentina's principal cultural contribution to UNESCO's International Polar Year 2007–09. The first edition's general curatorship was held by Iris Fernández Abascal and Leonor Amarante, who selected approximately sixty artists across more than twenty countries from some three hundred submitted proposals; the central exhibition was hosted at the Museo Marítimo y del Presidio de Ushuaia, the maritime and former-penitentiary museum that occupies the city's nineteenth-century reincidence prison.

The second edition, Intemperie (Inclement Weather, or — in the looser local idiom — Without Shelter), opened on 24 April 2009 and closed on 25 May, under the general curatorship of the German critic Alfons Hug (twice curator of the São Paulo Biennial), with Fernando Farina as curator for Argentina, Alberto Saraiva as curator for Brazil and curatorial assistants Paz Guevara and Melina Valente. The 2009 programme staged its principal exhibition across the disused hangar of the former Ushuaia naval airfield on the Beagle Channel shore, the Antigua Usina at San Martín and Lasserre, the Museo Marítimo's prison galleries, the Packewaia cinema and Yatana Park; it included some forty-two artists and groups and, as a separate logistical-curatorial component, the ICEPAC (International Catabatic Experimental Platform for Antarctic Culture) deployment, which placed eighteen artists' works at Antarctic Peninsula research stations across 3–17 February 2009. The most-photographed work of the edition — and the one that established the participating Argentine artist's career on the international biennial circuit — was Adrián Villar Rojas's Mi familia muerta, a twenty-eight-metre clay whale beached among the trees of Yatana Park.

An institution structured around an extreme geography

The third edition, Bienvenidos al Antropoceno (Welcome to the Anthropocene), ran from 25 August into late October 2011 under the general curatorship of Consuelo Císcar, then director of Valencia's IVAM (Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno), with the Spanish critic Avelino Sala among the participating curatorial voices; it was inaugurated at the Centro Beagle in Ushuaia and presented some hundred and fifty works by more than a hundred artists, including twenty-two Argentine artists. The edition's working subject — programmed before the term had reached its current general circulation in the geological and cultural literatures — was the proposition that the contemporary period constitutes a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in which the human species is the principal geological agent; the biennial's organising triad of art — society — environment was developed across the programme as the curatorial argument for an extreme-southern position from which to think the planet.

The fourth edition, Contrastes & Utopías, opened in Mar del Plata on 12 December 2014 and ran through 22 February 2015 under the artistic direction of the Italian curator Massimo Scaringella, with Italy as the honoured country, a committee of ten international curatorial selectors, and more than a hundred and fifty artists from thirty-five countries across five continents. The 2014–15 edition was the institutional moment at which the headquarters of the biennial relocated from Ushuaia to the Atlantic-coast resort city of Mar del Plata in Buenos Aires Province, on the argument that the larger summer-resort audience would expand the programme's reach; Ushuaia continued as a participating venue, and the edition extended binationally to Valparaíso and Punta Arenas in Chile. After the fourth edition the institution's continuing programming record is broken: announcements of further editions have appeared on the periphery of the institutional record, and a VI Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo was programmed for Ushuaia in February 2026 under the direction of María Elena Beneito, but the principal documented continuous programming arc of the Fundación Patagonia Arte y Desafío's Bienal del Fin del Mundo remains the four editions of 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2014–15.