This presentation by Chiara Cartuccia, titled ‘Art Biennials and the Mediterranean Conundrum’, surveys the last twelve editions of Manifesta and situates the biennial as a territory where both fabrication and rethinking of the periphery paradigm occur.

The talk presents research published in an essay of the same title that was commissioned for the March Meeting Papers. Selected through the March Meeting 2021 open call, the essays included in the March Meeting Papers expand on curator Okwui Enwezor’s influential thinking about the Biennial as a platform to engage with history, politics and society. Taken together, these essays reveal the extent to which the biennial model, such as the Sharjah Biennial, has contributed to the realisation of new narratives and experiences of modern and contemporary art.