Stewart Smith, Robert Pietrusko, Bernd Lintermann »trans_actions: The Accelerated Art World 1989–2011«, 2011. Video: © ZKM

Throughout the world biennales have been literally mushrooming over the last two decades. Whereas, in the mid-1980s there were six Biennales of contemporary art, today over 150 of them form a densely-knit network spanning across the world, which constitutes what is influential, interesting and relevant in today’s art scenes. Hence, commissioned by the ZKM Institute for Visual Media, Stewart Smith, Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Bernd Lintermann have collected and evaluated data on the temporal and spatial development of the Biennale system before going on to visualize it in trans_actions: The Accelerated Art World 1989–2011 (2011) on an eight- meter wide, three-meter high panorama screen. With this, trans_actions makes it clear that what we today call the global art world is, in fact, a conglomeration of globally recruited artists, globally active curators, disparate art markets and a concurrently emerging biennale landscape. Continue Reading ...