India’s Kochi-Muziris Biennale has been described as one of the most significant newly emergent biennales, alongside Shanghai, Sharjah and Dakar. However, there have been few sustained and critical studies of these events as specific sites of production and reception of contemporary art. This book, engaging with the Kochi Biennale, provides detailed examination of what the editors term as the ‘biennale effect’ — a layered contestation of place, economics, art and politics. It presents a close reading of the unique context of the biennale as well as sets out a broader critical framework for understanding global contemporary art and its effects. Replete with illustrations, this book will serve as an important and rare resource for scholars and researchers of contemporary art, art history, visual cultures, and media studies.

India's Kochi-Muziris Biennale has been described as one of the most significant newly emergent biennales, alongside Shanghai, Sharjah and Dakar. However, there have been few sustained and critical studies of these events as specific sites of production and reception of contemporary art. This book, engaging with the Kochi Biennale, provides detailed examination of what the editors term as the 'biennale effect' -- a layered contestation of place, economics, art and politics. It presents a close reading of the unique context of the biennale as well as sets out a broader critical framework for understanding global contemporary art and its effects. Replete with illustrations, this book will serve as an important and rare resource for scholars and researchers of contemporary art, art history, visual cultures, and media studies.

In A Fragile Inheritance Saloni Mathur investigates the work of two seminal figures from the global South: the New Delhi-based critic and curator Geeta Kapur and contemporary multimedia artist Vivan Sundaram. Examining their written and visual works over the past fifty years, Mathur illuminates how her protagonists’ political and aesthetic commitments intersect and foreground uncertainty, difficulty, conflict, and contradiction. This book presents new understandings of the culture and politics of decolonization and the role of non-Western aesthetic avant-gardes within the discourses of contemporary art. Through skillful interpretation of Sundaram's and Kapur’s practices, Mathur demonstrates how received notions of mainstream art history may be investigated and subjected to creative redefinition. Her scholarly methodology offers an impassioned model of critical aesthetics and advances a radical understanding of art and politics in our time.

Curated in China: Manipulating the City through the Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture provides an in-depth observation of an architecture and urbanism exhibition with transformative objectives. It uses simultaneous narratives to explore scales and perspectives and the layered spatial and political agency that an ephemeral event – the Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture – has gradually established in the city between 2005 and 2019. Encapsulating Shenzhen’s ambitions as a world-class city, the Biennale aims to actively build a relationship between architecture and socio-spatial issues as a device to not only investigate the city’s hypertrophic development, but also manipulate its urban fabric. The spaces transformed by the exhibition convey visual delight and urban extravaganza; they also embody the interlocking of multiple (intellectual, corporate and institutional) actors who exploit the event in the pursuit of different goals. Everybody strolls around and enjoys the spectacle set up in the allegedly pacifying space of the exhibition; nevertheless, what lies behind – and beyond – the event? By addressing students and scholars in the fields of architecture and urban space, the book unpacks the layered frictions between a temporary event’s narrative apparatus and its physical outcomes, questioning the relationship between biennials as theoretical platforms and their agency in real urban spaces.

What can culture, and its manifestations in artistic and creative forms, ‘do’? Creativity and resistance in a hostile world draws on original collaborative research that brings together a range of stories and perspectives on the role of creativity and resistance in a hostile world. In times of racial nationalism across the world, this volume seeks to understand how creative acts have agitated for social change. The book suggests that creative actions themselves, and acting together creatively, can at the same time offer vital sources of hope. Drawing on a series of case studies, this volume focuses on the past and emergent grassroots arts work that has responded to racisms, the legacies of colonialism or the depredations of capitalist employment across several contexts and locations, including England, Northern Ireland and India. The book makes a timely intervention, foregrounding the value of creativity for those who are commonly marginalised from centres of power, including from the mainstream cultural industries. The authors also critically reflect on the possibilities and limitations of collaborative research within and beyond the academy.

This book brings anthropologists and critical theorists together in order to investigate utopian visions of the future in the neoliberal cities of India and Sri Lanka. Arguing for the priority of materiality in any analysis of contemporary ideology, the authors explore urban construction projects, special economic zones, fashion ramps, films, archaeological excavations, and various queer spaces. In the process, they reveal how diverse co-existing utopian visions are entangled with local politics and global capital, and show how these utopian visions are at once driven by visions of excess and by increasing expulsions. It’s a dystopia already in the making – one marred by land grabs and forced evictions, rising inequality, and the loss of urbanity and civility.

The Routledge Handbook of Events explores and critically evaluates the debates and controversies associated with the rapidly expanding domain of Event Studies. It brings together leading specialists from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, to provide a state-of-the-art review on the evolution of the subject. The first edition was a landmark study which examined how event research had evolved and developed from a range of different social science subject areas and disciplines. The Handbook was the first critique of the extent to which the subject had developed into a major area of social science inquiry. This second edition has been fully updated to reflect crucial developments in the field and includes brand new sections on ever-important aspects of Event Studies such as: anthropology, hospitality, seasonality, knowledge management, accessibility, diversity and human rights, as well as new studies on ‘the eventful city’ and the benefits of events in older life. The book is divided into four inter-related sections. Section 1 introduces and evaluates the concept of events. Section 2 critically reviews the relationship between events and other disciplines such as the contribution of economics, psychology and geography to the critical discourse of Event Studies. Section 3 focuses on the business, operational and strategic management of events, while the final section crucially focuses on critical events as a new paradigm within the burgeoning literature on Events. It offers the reader a comprehensive and critical synthesis of this field, conveying the latest thinking associated with events research, edited by two of the leading scholars in the field. The text will provide an invaluable resource for all those with an interest in Events Studies, encouraging dialogue that will span across disciplinary boundaries and other areas of study. It is an essential guide for anyone interested in events research.