The Next Art-of-Peace Biennale

THE NEXT ART-OF-PEACE BIENNALE 2015-17 was a curatorial project that resumed Robert Filliou's artistic and curatorial question ‘what shapes peace'? The first edition of the biennale was the exhibition ‘Zugehend auf eine Biennale des Friedens’ (or ‘Towards an Art-of-Peace Biennale’) organised by René Block in 1985. Future editions were intended to travel, have different curators and take different forms. Notwithstanding Louwrien Wijers’ important ‘Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy (AmSSE)’ symposia of 1990s, the Biennale in Hamburg remains by name the inaugural, sole edition of the Art-of-Peace Biennale and is ripe for exploration now, after globalisation and after the net. THE NEXT ART-OF-PEACE BIENNALE 2015-7 asked 'what shapes peace today'?

THE NEXT ART-OF-PEACE BIENNALE 2015-17 was a nomadic biennale, a biennale-as-meeting, as-workshop, as-network fulfilling Filliou’s aims for periodical gatherings of artists ‘presenting their individual contributions to this collective research.' Organised by self-appointed curator Roddy Hunter, the contemporary edition occured mainly, though not exclusively, through the online resource www.peacebiennale.info. The 2015-2017 edition sought to respond to the radical shift in modes of online production, distribution and reception since the first edition. It did so to engage with the the Internet as ‘the most material and visible sign of globalisation’ (Manovich 2001) whose emergence as preeminent network technology arrives concurrently with the disappearance of its utopian promise. It is intended as a network of online and offline ‘manifestations, meanderings, meditations, microcosms, macrocosms, mixtures, meanings …’ (Filliou 1970, 202).