The recently published 'Biennial Reader' is the first anthology devoted exclusively to the study of the 'biennial phenomenon' that came to dominate the field of contemporary art the past two decades. The book itself was the outcome of a 2009 conference on biennials that took place in Bergen, Norway from 17 - 20 September.
The editors, Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal and Solveig Øvstebø, suggest that a systematic study on biennials appears today as urgent as never before. To that end, they somewhat provocatively propose that a new field called biennialogy should appear, in order to inaugurate a study on the biennial phenomenon in a more rigorous way (as there is 'museology' for instance). 'Biennialogy', as I understand it, will not only aim to 'generate a body of knowledge' about the biennial, but it will also deal with the particular specificities of the study of the 'biennial'; say with all the peculiarities that a multi-sited ethnographic research on biennials might have, given their enormous spatial distribution and qualitative variations. The formation of this new 'field', is for the authors particularly crucial for the discourse of contemporary art today, as it is also crucial for more 'traditional' cultural studies, in order - as they say- “to understand something crucial about our culture today”. That is because, the biennial seems to be gradually complementing the museum as an institutional site for promoting and producing knowledge about contemporary art:
