Who are biennials for? Recent examples suggest that these events put the intellectual and political desires of their organisers ahead of those of their audiences or host cities.
“The decolonisation hordes have taken over institutions.” Obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, they are attacking their own cause and harming scholarship on and in Africa.
Kader Attia’s Still Present!, the 12th Berlin Biennale is an attempt to unpick the centuries-long threads of imperialism one by one in the hope that they can reconstitute a universe capable of averting its demise. But this is a vain hope.