Biennale model ‘not sustainable’, says new director Jose Roca

The director of the 2022 Biennale of Sydney will be cutting back on travel and freight.

Biennale chief executive Barbara Moore with The Mulka Project’s video artwork Watami Manikay (Song of the Winds). Picture: John Appleyard

The global contemporary art circuit, with its traffic of people and freight around the world, is unsustainable and can no longer exist in a “state of exception”, says incoming director of the Biennale of Sydney, Jose Roca.

A curator from Bogota, Colombia, Roca has led biennales and art programs in South America and has worked in Britain and the US.

Before the pandemic shut down much international travel, he said, art fairs and biennales were consuming too much carbon.

“Art is not a state of exception,” he said. “We do exhibitions about sustainability but we really don’t think about how sustainable we are, in terms of materials that are used, the flights, everything … Art leaves a huge carbon footprint.”

With more than 50 biennales around the world vying for artists and visitors, the model was in ­“crisis”, he said.

At the Biennale of Sydney, international visitors usually comprise a quarter (23 per cent) of attendees. More than 850,000 people visited the previous exhibition in 2018.

“It’s not sustainable,” Roca said of the biennale model. “It’s the same galleries, the same artists, the same collectors, hopping from one country to another. The fairs are all the same. So I think the model was going to implode at some point, and (the pandemic) has accelerated something you could see coming for a long time.”

Speaking from Bogota where he runs a contemporary art space called FLORA ars+natura, Roca said he would take a different ­approach when he started work on the next edition of the Biennale of Sydney, due in 2022.

Instead of flying around the world on studio and gallery visits, he would rely on trusted networks and colleagues, including a team of Australian curators, and seek to be a “catalyser” for art projects already in progress. Art works would be fabricated or reproduced in Australia, where appropriate, to minimise international freight.

Biennale chief executive Barbara Moore said major institutions and events were taking steps towards sustainability, including the current edition of the Biennale, directed by Brook Andrew.

The exhibition, NIRIN, had to close just 10 days after opening in March, and reopened in June at venues including Carriageworks, the Art Gallery of NSW and Cockatoo Island. It will close in most venues at month’s end.