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The Bienal Internacional de Curitiba, commemorative edition in its 20 years, makes a biennial review of the format and how it ignores the practice of choosing a theme and title.

Teixeira Coelho. Photo: Bienal de Curitiba

Results of the ascendancy of the curator of the art system, this practice today is little convincing. The link between the theme / title and the works presented in any biennial is weak or imaginary, since almost any subject / title, always a feature spectacular advertising, may be applied to almost any grouping of works. 

As the works remain and themes / titles forget, this edition of the Bienal de Curitiba will be focused on the choice of works that might represent a significant aesthetic experience for the city. The only criterion for the selection of these works is the quality / relevance: they must impose itself on the quality and be able to point to some of the many issues of contemporary art. Each piece is its own discourse. No commit to the logo of the curator.

Anyway, this edition of the Bienal de Curitiba special open space for urban art, actor increasingly present on the international scene and it offers a direct and immediate contact with the users of the city. Thus, Curitiba Biennial will seek to leave a residue in town and lasting artistic denser than usual, including through the establishment of laboratories for reflection and practice – LARPs – that seek to appropriate power lines contained in the selected works and turn them into vectors unfolding of creation in Curitiba. Education institutions and various think-tanks in the city – the schools of art, architecture, communication, research institutes – will have an important role in the process.

The Biennial is a way that, as such, has the general characteristics by which to define the genre to which it belongs and the unique aspects of any of its possible manifestations. The shape-biennial is now an entity in conflict: this edition of the Biennale Curitiba reaffirms the broad outline of the shape-biennial and contradicts much as you can do it without cancel it. The story will, if appropriate.

Teixeira Coelho and Ticio Escobar