Biennials as Pedagogical Tools: Examining strategies and effects of the discursive practices on education and public programmes of large-scale periodic contemporary art exhibitions, Learning from the Mercosul Biennial (6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th editions) and the Liverpool Biennial (2016 and 2018) + A Critical Toolkit

Saenger Silva, G (2026) Biennials as Pedagogical Tools: Examining strategies and effects of the discursive practices on education and public programmes of large-scale periodic contemporary art exhibitions, Learning from the Mercosul Biennial (6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th editions) and the Liverpool Biennial (2016 and 2018) + A Critical Toolkit. Doctoral thesis, Liverpool John Moores University.

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Abstract

Situated at the intersection of contemporary art history, exhibition studies, and biennial studies, this doctoral research examines the discursive practices of education and public programmes within large-scale, periodic contemporary art exhibitions. These practices generate knowledge beyond the exhibition itself through catalogues, publications, events, and pedagogical initiatives. Since the proliferation of biennials in the 1980s and 1990s, such programmes, often referred to as public or educational, have become central strategies to extend, challenge, and complement exhibitionary formats. Although their documentation is frequently fragile, overlooked, or inconsistently archived, limiting both scholarly analysis and institutional reflection, they have grown in scope and complexity. Symposiums, debates, talks, and mediation programmes now operate as infrastructures of knowledge production, enhancing public understanding of curatorial discourse and artworks, while special publications and essay collections extend thematic debates beyond the exhibition itself. This research does not aim to provide a comprehensive historical survey but instead develops an experience-based and practice-based analysis.

The research draws on the researcher’s professional experience in various roles, as mediator, educator, producer, facilitator, and curator within contemporary art biennials. It takes the Mercosul Biennial (6th–9th editions) and the Liverpool Biennial (2016, 2018) as case studies, analysing their strategies and effects while situating them within wider shifts in biennial-making. The study combines theoretical reflection, case study analysis, and practice-based methods in an autotheoretical mode.

The thesis makes two key practice-based contributions. First, a collection of essays that critically reflect on biennial practices from an embedded, autotheoretical perspective, testing conceptual propositions such as biennials as utopian machines, radical pedagogies, or experiments in precarity. Second, the Biennial as Pedagogical Tools, a critical taxonomy in a toolkit format designed as a non-linear, dialogical instrument for planning, reflecting on, and evaluating discursive programmes. This toolkit consolidates a legacy vocabulary emerging from fieldwork, case studies, and lived experience, and is intended to be adaptable across biennials, museums, and grassroots projects.
Through these outputs, the thesis argues that biennials must be understood not only as sites of exhibition-making but as infrastructures of mediation, education, and discursive practice. It contributes to biennial studies by reframing historiography around pedagogical and discursive dimensions; to curatorial practice by proposing a pedagogical-curatorial paradigm that recognises mediators and educators as co-authors; and to discursive art education by demonstrating how critical pedagogy can be part of the exhibition spaces.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	biennial studies; contemporary art; education and public programmes,; Mercosul Biennial
Subjects:	N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general N Fine Arts > N4390-5098 Exhibitions
Divisions:	Art and Creative Industries
Date of acceptance:	4 June 2026
Date of first compliant Open Access:	10 July 2026
Date Deposited:	10 Jul 2026 13:20
Last Modified:	10 Jul 2026 13:36
DOI or ID number:	10.24377/LJMU.t.00028946
Supervisors:	Krysa, J and Birchall, M
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/28946

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