What did it mean for the French state's museum of non-European arts to programme a continuing biennial under the rubric of non-Western photography — and what does the 2015 closure reveal about the continuing political-curatorial difficulty of the frame in the late-2010s biennial system?
The Musée du quai Branly is itself the most-debated of the French state's twenty-first-century museum projects: opened in 2006 as the principal cultural initiative of Jacques Chirac's presidency, it consolidated under one new institutional roof the former ethnographic collections of the Musée de l'Homme and the former African and Oceanian collections of the Palais de la Porte Dorée, and rehoused them in a building by Jean Nouvel on the Left Bank that was conceived as a contemporary museum of arts and not as a museum of anthropology. The institutional argument the new museum made — that the non-European cultural objects it held should be programmed as art rather than as ethnographic specimen — has been treated in the postcolonial museum-studies literature as both an institutional advance (recognition that the work in question belonged to the art-historical canon and not to the ethnographic record) and as a continuing instance of the museological problem of West-centred display (a French state institution arrogating to itself the framing of the rest of the world's cultural production under a category that, even renamed, retained its imperial inheritance). Photoquai was conceived as the contemporary photographic extension of that institutional project.
The frame the biennial proposed — that the contemporary photographic practice of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas required a dedicated Parisian platform because it remained insufficiently visible within the city's established photographic programmes (Paris Photo, the Mois de la Photo, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie) — was, on its own terms, defensible: the practical absence of contemporary photographers from outside the Euro-American canon from the major Parisian photographic exhibitions of the early 2000s was widely documented, and the biennial's open-air free-access format on the Seine quai was an institutional gesture of generosity in a city whose photography market was otherwise organised around private galleries and ticketed institutional venues. The biennial's open-air installations attracted audiences of 400,000 to 530,000 across the 2011, 2013 and 2015 editions — figures few European photography festivals achieve outside of Arles — and the curatorial leadership across the five editions (Ghabaian from Tehran, Huguier from Paris, Kalero from Madrid, working with regional curatorial teams) extended the institution's editorial voice well beyond the Branly's curatorial staff.
The continuing difficulty, which the 2015 closure and the announced budgetary suspension threw into relief, was the question of whether a single Western institution can programme a biennial whose constituting category is the rest of the world. The institutional logic of the framing — that non-Western describes a coherent contemporary photographic field — has, across the long 2010s, been the working argument the wider Euro-American biennial system has had to abandon: the Bamako Encounters in Mali, the Lagos Photo festival in Nigeria, the Addis Foto Fest in Ethiopia, the Chobi Mela in Bangladesh and the wider network of African and Asian photography festivals have together made the structural point that the contemporary photographic practice of the global south is organised in its own dense institutional network and does not require a Parisian platform to be visible. Photoquai's institutional argument, in 2007, was that it was offering such a platform; by 2015, that argument had become harder to sustain — the question for the Quai Branly's curatorial leadership became not whether the biennial was generous, but whether the framing under which it was generous was the correct framing for the late 2010s.
The institutional silence on the closure has been the case study's structural feature. The museum's president did not, in 2016, set out the curatorial argument against continuing the biennial under a more contemporary frame; the announcement was administrative, budgetary, declined comment. Ten years later, with the museum under new presidential leadership and the wider Parisian photographic field reorganised around different institutional anchors, the question Photoquai asked — what does it mean for a Western state museum to programme the rest of the world's contemporary photography — remains open, and the institutional record of the five editions reads as a useful case study of where, in late-2010s biennial culture, the limits of West-centred curatorial framings of the rest of the world were beginning to be felt.
