Biennials from the so-called 'peripheral' countries aspire to become other potential centers and to decentralize what was concentrated upon a Euro-American axis until the end of the Cold War.
[6] The African continent is no exception and countries started to organize art biennials (besides pan-African festivals which are not included in this account) since the 1950s.
Nonetheless, the 1990s, a moment of geopolitical shifts both inside (e.g. the demise of apartheid in South Africa) and outside (e.g. the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe) the continent, leading to political reorganization, the change of cultural politics and economics as well as urban renewal, were really the decade when art biennials started to be seen as the best 'invention'[7] to promote local art and reach a global audience.
Even if the off was founded by the biennale's administration and not by an external association, it is considered by many as the core of the biennial, giving an extra-space of visibility to the dynamism and richness of African artistic creation, and particularly to promote the Senegalese artists who are not selected in the official exhibitions.8 Indeed, the selection process is an open call, which has been criticized by many artists who wish a more curated event, because in their view the open call is not democratic as it claims to be, but favors those who have access to relevant information and the means to set up an application file.9 Each edition is different from the previous one, each learning from the criticism that was made through evaluation seminars.
Therefore, curator Simon Njami qualifies the Biennale de Bamako as a "transplanted" event, which required work on a local scale to legitimize the biennial that could first be seen as a neocolonial event serving foreign purposes.11 It certainly succeeded to gain a local as well as an international renown because it boosted the creation of photography based festivals such as the PhotoFesta Maputo (2002)12, the Gwanza Month of Photography (2009)13, or the Lagos Photo Festival (2010)14 just to name a few.
Founded to celebrate the end of Apartheid and the reopening of the country to the world after decades of boycott, the Johannesburg Biennale, despite its short life (only two editions: Africus in 1995 and Trade Routes in 1997), is one of the best examples of the fundamental tension into which biennials are caught: to settle into the local and to gain renown on an international level.
Its absence of engagement with the South African communities and the conceptual and elitist character of the exhibited artworks were harshly criticized in the local press.
The biennial was thus seen as a grafted event, serving political interests rather than social and cultural ones, and favoring an international art discourse over a local one.
Even if some of these biennials are irregularly organized or even abandoned, they are nonetheless symptoms of a cultural effervescence and a will to promote and encourage local artists, be it on a regional level or on a more international one.
The existence of communication, transport and accommodation infrastructures is necessary and their absence thus requires a consequent budget to build and/or renovate them, which can be a problem for a city/country that does not have the resources to do so.
To be accepted at a local level, that is to say, to have the support of the city council or the State, is a sine qua non condition to ensure longevity and financial stability to the biennial.
At the same time, by changing the traditional trajectories of the art world, those biennials force Western institutions to renew themselves, for example by appointing Okwui Enwezor to Documenta11 (2001–2002) or, more recently, to the 56th Venice Biennale's (2015) artistic direction.