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The conference organised as part of the Bienal included contributions from highly influential cultural theoreticians and yielded a debate, both formal and impromptu, that was remarkable for its richness and energy. The works were made by a range of producers that included not only some very young artists and some legendary in stature, but also doll-makers, admirers of Simón Bolívar and children inventing their own toys. The Bienal’s shows presented a varied array, setting conceptually-based works exploring art and its contexts alongside polemical and, in some cases, latter-day modernist assertions of local identities, for instance.
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Its large central exhibition was offset by dozens of smaller displays and events organised under the rubric of what the curators called núcleos (nuclei), thematic organising principles that tackled discrete aspects of contemporaneous cultural production in the Bienal’s focal regions of Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It was a wide-ranging, heterodox and rambunctious affair, comprised of shows, discussions, social spaces and both planned and fortuitous encounters. The third Bienal was one of the first exhibitions of contemporary art to aspire to a global reach, both in terms of content and impact, and it was the first to do so from outside of the European and North American art system, which had, until then, undertaken to decide what art had global significance. Moreover, the integration of a major international conference into the Bienal’s structure represents a decisive step towards conceiving of biennials as discursive environments, in which the actual display of artworks is part of a much broader project of research and knowledge production. It also introduced a broadly thematic approach and rejected the established practice of awarding prizes for individual or national displays. Firstly, it dispensed with the idea of an exhibition segmented into national presentations, thus breaking the mould established by the Venice Biennale in 1895. Opening on 1 November 1989, it put into practice some ideas about curating large international exhibitions that have since been recognised as key innovations. The third Bienal is a groundbreaking, if relatively unknown, moment in the history of recent exhibition-making. The case for 1989 as the most important of its editions stands on the extent and adventurousness of the research that went into it, the freshness of its curatorial propositions, the extraordinary energy of the event, the richness of the dialogues that it established and its timing, opening a few months after the Paris exhibition ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ (‘Magicians of the Earth’), which claimed to be ‘the first world-wide exhibition of contemporary art’. Since its inception in 1984, the Bienal de La Habana has followed a trajectory that culminated culturally and curatorially in the third edition in 1989, and which peaked in other terms (institutional solidity, organisational professionalism, international recognition) somewhat later.