Panama Art Biennial 2008

The Panama Art Biennial is the most prestigious event for the advancement of the contemporary visual arts in Panama. It offers creative individuals a non-commercial space within which to produce and exhibit their art, providing contact with the general public and with critics, as well as promoting their work through a bilingual catalog published after the exhibition, which is distributed nationally and internationally.

The Biennial has been held in Panama’s Museum of Contemporary Art since 1992, when it was founded by Irene Escoffery (†) and Monica Kupfer. Over these past 16 years, the Biennial has experienced a process of constant renovation, from its initial stages as a painting competition to its status today as a contemporary art exhibition that includes all artistic media. It is a show that does not attempt to survey contemporary art in Panama, but rather to contribute to its renewal in a significant way.

The eighth edition of the Panama Art Biennial’s main axis will be an exhibit The Sweet Burnt Smell of History, conceived by the Mexican curator Magali Arriola. For the first time, the Biennial has a specific theme: the art projects have been developed around the idea of the former Panama Canal Zone, an enclave under the administration of the United States Federal Government from the time of its creation and until the implementation of the 1977 treaties.

The Biennial will conceptually operate within two communicating levels. Artists familiar with the Canal Zone through previous residences has been invited to do in situ interventions that can open up a dialogue with the past and present history of this territory. Other artists, probably unacquainted with the place, are invited to conceive works and interventions operating from different and distant latitudes as reflections on the political and cultural evanescence of a place, and as speculations on the significance of this kind of geographical transactions.

The 8th Panama Biennial seeks to take full advantage of the potential of a small-format exhibition for the creation of new meanings; by generating, together with a small group of artists, a working process based on the curator’s initial premise. The artists are expected to generate works of art that reflect upon the appearance, disappearance, and transformation of territories, as well as the mobility of geographic borders in today’s world, reconsidering the way in which each individual negotiates and constructs his or her notions of identity or belonging.

The idea behind this edition is that the Biennial focuses its efforts towards establishing a space that will stimulate, support, and value the artists’ research projects as well as the development of more solidly grounded creative processes that not only make sense, but are pertinent to both the local and international contexts.