SEVILLE, SPAIN.- Opening on 26 October 2006 and running through 8 January 2007, the Second Edition of the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville (BIACS 2) will bring a wide array of programming to numerous sites located both within and adjacent to Seville and the greater Andalusian region. Under the direction of the late Harald Szeemann (1933-2005), the 1st Edition of the Seville Biennial (BIACS 1) brought a large number of internationally recognized artists to the city, signalling the development of the region as a growing part of the larger community of contemporary art. Now with BIACS 2, the Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor will expand upon the foundation established two years ago, with the exhibition project: The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society.

Artistic Director of Documenta 11 in Kassel (1998-2002) and the Second Johannesburg Biennale (1996-1997), Enwezor will work closely with a number of individuals and organizations to create various sites for reflection, interaction, and critical dialogue. These sites will serve as forums for artists, thinkers, and the public to consider the situation of contemporary art today and artists engagement with a wide range of aesthetic, political, social, and cultural issues. These activities will unfold along a number of axes:

To begin, Biacs2 will occupy two main sites within the city of Seville: Andalusian Center of Contemporary Art (at the Monasterio de la Cartuja) and the Reales Atarazanas, an impressive shipbuilding structure dating to the mid 13th century, the new venue of this second edition. The exhibition will move across the Guadalquivir River to link the Isla de Cartuja with the historical centre. Both venues will show a rich collection of sculpture, painting, photography, film, video, and other largescale installations by internationally renowned artists. Besides the CAAC and the Atarazanas, the Biacs2 will seek to intervene directly in the public urban space to attract the impression of the man in the street: balconies, shop windows in the city centre and even one of the bridges spanning the Guadalquivir River will serve as the frames for different artistic projects in the second edition. Continuing with Enwezor’s engagement with methods of dissemination of knowledge, the two main sites of the exhibition will be augmented by several collaborations between BIACS and cultural institutions based in the city. One such collaboration is an extended pedagogical program with the University of Seville. This program will be reinforced through lectures, conferences and presentations by visiting scholars, artists and thinkers. Specifically, the artistic director of Biacs2 will direct a Curatorial Workshop in which several internationally known curators and scholars of contemporary art will come to Seville as part of this program. In addition, the University will also carry out a project entitled Under Fire: Seminars Addressing the Organisation and Representation of Violence, led by the artist Jordan Crandall.

Such a constellation prompts us to ask, “What is the space of the Unhomely?” To answer this question, the exhibition must look beyond the metaphor of the city and begin to reflect upon the complex nature of adjacency and the asymptotic importance of residing next-to, outside-of, or with-in a given site. For example, how might we begin to evaluate the nuanced relationship between Northern Africa and Europe, as a problem space? If so, then how do artists, activists, thinkers and the public address, confirm or deny this? To engage the issue of adjacency the exhibition project will utilize a number of venues and forums that includes a film festival in collaboration with the Cinémathèque de Tanger, planned for late autumn, under the title Among the Moderns. This Festival will not only address the complexity of the space existing between Europe and North Africa, but also provide a platform for further dialogue on the concept of neighbourliness. Films and videos produced by artists of different horizons (geographic and aesthetic), but who work all to redefine the representations produced on and from the Arabic World.

Firstly it is meant to break a normative iconography widely relieved by the media, and secondly it is especially meant to create an auditory for relevant voices and a basis to see the complexity of this space, including the singular modernity which we negotiate there (between the tradition and the modernity invented and modelled by the West). In order to expand the expositive concept to include new ways of perceiving things, so that the Biacs2 can be experienced from multiple points of views and not be limited to mere figurative contemplation, the exhibition will include a new and essential component, the theatre. It will not be perceived as a performance, but rather as a series of dramatic readings that will communicate the most basic sense of the direct relationship between the texts and the audience, with nothing else in between. Further, a bi-weekly Op-Ed column in collaboration with the cultural magazine ABCD Las Artes y Las Letras will be published in national press, beginning in September of this year and running throughout the course of the Biennial; this ongoing project will serve as an additional outlet for philosophers, artists, thinkers, and cultural critics to reflect upon the condition of The Unhomely tracing the great disturbances that have unsettled social, cultural, economic and political relations in many regions of the world. More than simply a series of articles and interviews, this aspect of the Biennial will be a vital public tool for critical debate in a global community. Finally, in conjunction with The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society, a comprehensive catalogue will be published in the form of a book and a reference. Not simply a representation of Biacs2 and the exhibition, the catalogue will feature a variety of critical essays by thinkers from philosophy, art, political theory, and will represent the moment in which the exhibition takes place.