See the ultimate guide to biennales and art festivals in 2022. We’ve chosen those that we believe are worth attending. Make sure you don’t miss them!
La Biennale de Lyon
14 September – 31 December 2022
The Lyon Biennale has established itself as France’s flagship contemporary art event and a highlight on the global calendar of the discipline’s greatest events, more than 30 years after its debut in 1991.
The 2022 edition of the Bienniale, conceived by curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath as a “manifesto of fragility”, places fragility at the centre of a generative form of resistance that is inspired by the past, attentive to the present, and ready for the future.
Read more: https://www.labiennaledelyon.com/
BAD+ Fair
7 July – 10 July 2022
The first edition of BAD+ Bordeaux + Art + Design, a new art and design salon, will take place on the banks of the Garonne from July 7 to 10, 2022, in the renowned two-story concrete and steel industrial edifice HANGAR 14. Each spring, BAD+ brings together 70 international art and design galleries in an innovative new event that will bring together public and private cultural and economic players from Bordeaux and beyond to see how art and l’art de vivre are at the heart of transformations integral to the major issues confronting our world today.
Read more: https://bad-bordeaux.com/en
Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA)
15 July – 2 October 2022
The third edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA3), themed “Exercises in Respect” and lasting from July 15 to October 2, will feature 63 artists in the main exhibition at Andrejsala, which will be supervised by Chief Curator René Block. Nico Anklam is the associate curator at RIBOCA3 and will also develop the public program alongside René Block.
RIBOCA3 will return its focus from curatorial to creative as a core element. Exercises in Respect will not have a predetermined curatorial premise, instead allowing guiding themes and storylines to emerge spontaneously through the artworks themselves.
The artist’s vision serves as the conceptual starting point for RIBOCA3, which positions exhibition-making as a venue for creative expression devoid of preconceived ideas. The biennial allows each piece of art to operate on its own terms, with a natural conversation initiated rather than via the lens of a predetermined curatorial theme. “Exercises in Respect” is a title that underscores the importance of understanding what each artwork says individually while simultaneously acting within the context of a biennial.
Read more: https://www.rigabiennial.com/en/
Steirischerherbst’22
22 September – 16 October 2022
The 55th edition of the steirischer herbst festival will take place from September 22 to October 16. In June, a sneak peek of the theme and participating artists will be revealed. The video archive contains talks, documentation films, and Situation Reports from previous festival editions.
Read more: https://www.steirischerherbst.at/en/
UPFEST
28th & 29th May 2022
Upfest is back! Upfest is known for bringing together the best street artists, and festival-goers can expect to see spectacular murals appear in the streets of Bedminster beginning on May 5th. Hundreds of artists will paint live with festival hubs at Tobacco Factory and Ashton Gate Stadium during the festival weekend, following three weeks of street painting. The festival will take over Greville Smyth Park as its primary location for the first time this year, with music and live painting throughout the weekend.
The festival is free to attend, and the street art that is normally painted throughout the festival weekend will now be made between the 5th and 26th of May, building up to the festival weekend of the 28th and 29th of May, allowing more people to view these stunning creations firsthand. On the festival weekend, the murals will be completed for viewing while over 250 artists paint live alongside music stages and food and drink experiences.
Read more: https://www.upfest.co.uk/
La Biennale di Venezia
23 April – 27 November 2022
Cecilia Alemani will curate the 59th International Art Exhibition, which will run from April 23 to November 27, 2022 (pre-opening on April 20, 21, and 22). “As the first Italian woman to hold this position, I intend to give voice to artists to create unique projects that reflect their visions and our society”, Alemani has declared.
Cecilia Alemani is a curator who has curated numerous contemporary art shows. She is the current Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art, a public art initiative in New York’s urban park, and was formerly the curator of the Italian Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2017.
Read more: https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2022/information
Manifesta, the European Nomadic Biennial
22 July – 30 October 2022
Every two years, Manifesta, the European Nomadic Biennial, moves to a new location. Manifesta rethinks the relationship between culture and civic society, examining and inspiring positive social change through modern culture in response to, and in close collaboration with, the social sphere of the Host City and its communities, since its inception in the early 1990s. To shine a light on a world defined by shifting ethical and aesthetic imperatives, Manifesta has constantly picked surprising host places that represent Europe’s ever-changing DNA. As a recurring event, Manifesta has evolved into a multidimensional and inclusive tool for civic participation projects.
In 2022, Manifesta 14 Prishtina will take place in Prishtina, Kosovo. Through the creation of a new cultural institution, Manifesta 14 aspires to support the residents of Kosovo in their efforts to reclaim public space and rewrite the future of their capital as an open-minded city in the Balkans and Europe.
Read more: https://manifesta.org/
Documenta fifteen
18 June – 25 September 2022
Ruangrupa is the Artistic Direction of the fifteenth edition of documenta. The Jakarta-based artists’ collective has built the foundation of their documenta fifteen on the core values and ideas of lumbung (Indonesian term for a communal rice barn). Lumbung is an artistic and commercial concept based on ideas of collectivity, communal resource sharing, and equal allocation, which are represented in every aspect of the collaboration and the exhibition.
Read more: https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/
The Whitney Biennial
6 April – 5 September 2022
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the Museum’s founder, inaugurated the Whitney Biennial in 1932. It is the longest-running exhibition of its type, having been established to document developments in American art. More than 3,600 important and inventive artists have taken part in a Whitney biennial or yearly exhibition to date. The Biennial’s eightieth edition, in 2022, will feature a constellation of the most relevant art and ideas of our time.
“Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept” is co-organized by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Mia Matthias, Curatorial Assistant; Gabriel Almeida Baroja, Curatorial Project Assistant; and Margaret Kross, former Senior Curatorial Assistant.
Read more: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/the-biennial
Carnegie International
24 September 2022 – 2 April 2023
The 58th Carnegie International examines the United States’ geopolitical footprint since 1945 in order to place the “international” within our local context. This framework provides the basis for the historical movements of images, ideas, objects, and people that inspire emancipatory statements and artworks. The International aims to promote dialogue about a variety of practical and symbolic manoeuvres—migration, appropriation, expropriation, and decolonization—as well as culture’s resistance to the disruptions and dislocations caused by these interventions and their long-term consequences. The exhibitions include historical presentations in conversation with the museum’s collection, as well as new commissions displayed at the museum and various locations across Pittsburgh.
Read more: https://cmoa.org/2022-carnegie-international/
Istanbul Biennial
17 September – 20 November 2022
Due to an increase of Covid-19 cases in Turkey, the physical edition of the Istanbul Biennial‘s seventeenth edition has been postponed till 2022.
The ISKV has said that the biennial will continue to “act as a seedbed” for other projects, at least some of them presumably virtual, scheduled to take place throughout the remainder of 2021. No details have yet been released. The theme of the now-delayed biennial, revealed in March, is ecological in nature. “Let this biennial be compost,” the curators had earlier declared, “There may be no great gathering, no orchestrated coming together in one time and place; instead it might be a dispersal, an invisible fermentation.”
Read more: https://bienal.iksv.org/en
Berlin Biennale
11 June – 18 September 2022
The Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art has grown to become one of the most important international forums for contemporary art ever since its inception in 1996. In one of Europe’s most culturally progressive towns, each edition brings together the most significant current positions of artists, theorists, and practitioners from a variety of fields.
Every two years, the Berlin Biennale takes place in various locations in Berlin, and it is characterized by the diverse themes of its renowned curators. It encourages creative formats and gives curators the room and independence to express the most current, relevant, and challenging viewpoints, regardless of the art market or collector interests. Several young artists have achieved international recognition as a result of their participation in the exhibition.
Read more: https://www.berlinbiennale.de/en/
The Biennale of Sydney
12 March – 13 June 2022
The 23rd Sydney Biennale is organized around a series of conceptual wetlands located around the Gadigal, Burramatagal, and Cabrogal peoples’ waterways. These imagined ecosystems are populated by artworks, experiments, activisms and research, which together follow the currents of meandering tributaries, expanding out into a delta of interrelated ideas including river horror, creek futurism, Indigenous science, cultural flows, ancestral technologies, counter-mapping, queer ecologies, multispecies justice, hydrofeminism, water healing, spirit streams, fish philosophy and sustainable methods of co-existence.
Read more: https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/
DAK’ART
19 May – 21 June 2022
The 14th Dakar Biennale brings together 59 artists and artists’ collectives to construct a new common destiny. Create, imagine, and invent new things. The official international exhibition of the 14th edition of the Biennial of Contemporary African Art in Dakar (May 19 – June 21, 2022) will be centred on this triptych.
The official selection, consistent with the orientations of the Artistic Direction, will highlight the works of 59 visual artists and artists’ collectives. They come from Africa and its diaspora. According to Dr El Hadji Malick Ndiaye, Artistic Director of the 2022 Edition, the theme “Ĩ Ndaffa#” sounds like an exhortation to create a new common destiny, a future together.
Read more: https://biennaledakar.org/
We carefully selected a list of interesting design festivals of 2022. There are many of these festivals each year and we’ve chosen those that we believe are worth seeing. Read our article to find out more information. Maybe some festivals will catch your attention and you will visit them this year?
