I’ll Name My Kid Biennial Biennial

OOU Biennial strives to merge the qualities of both a biennial and an art fair to offer an alternative to underfunded ngo exhibition venues or events and overly commercially oriented art fairs. While non-governmental and not-for-profit exhibition venues are commonly the space where new art practices find their visibility, most of the profit of a potential sale misses them and is divided between a gallery and a fair. OOU claims its space in between, in the form of a 100% privately funded biennial that wishes to reintroduce radical artistic gestures as well as concepts of fair trade into the contemporary art market while retaining the playfulness and joy of a late-summer festival.

// DRAFT //

Whatever happens in the arts lately makes me wanna punch Hans Ulrich Obrist in the face. Let’s do something new. While having fun, earning money and thinking about our children. My Biennial. His mother is black, her father is a jew, their sister is a refugee. And I’m half Serbian, half asshole. Is that what art is about? Fuck no. Biennial is gonna be a bad boy. He’s gonna sell coke at Art Basel preview with his VIP Pass and sneak into strange russian parties at Peggy’s in Venice. I’ll Name My Kid Biennial Biennial is not Venice. It’s not Athens, it’s not Ljubljana, nor Berlin. It’s hobo diaries meets Slobodan Milosevic in front of Mona Lisa with her eyes closed. Van Gogh might lose another ear and Zdenka Badovinac might get rehired. But who the fuck cares.

What’s a biennial? Seventeen art snobs trying to fuck each other in the ass while their wifes are watching and learning how to say #metoo. I don’t want my kid to grow up in this shit. Let’s forget #metoo and kill l'auteur. If god died in 1882, the author was killed in 1962, history ended in 1992, can we finally do something new? Hans Ulrich Obrist is eating ice cream with Klaus Biesenbach while Olafur Eliasson is smuggling ice on tankers from Antarctica to Tate spending a shitton of oil on the way to remind us of global warming and Ai Weiwei is sailing the SIlk Road with his giant plastic dinghy saving Taiwanese LGBTQ+ refugees on the way. And still the Arsenale of nowadays is a freeport.

What does my Biennial have to say about all this? Kids don’t have voting rights, but my Biennial’s been given the right to change shit. We’re talking about his future in the end. We’re all gonna get a hearth attack on Viagra fucking an overly expensive hooker in Miami after celebrating we bought/sold a Cattalan piece for more/less than 150k. Plus taxes.

We’re in the Balkans. Not many years ago Vaclav Havel was humanitarily bombing Belgrade while the Neue Slowenische Kunst was playing soldiers in Sarajevo. Everything is fair in love and war. And art. What’s freedom? Dreams, sex and art. And nothing fucking else. Maybe killing Bosnians with a sniper rifle in 1994, but Radovan Karadić is safe at the Hague now. And “Niko ne sme više da nas bije!”

We’re in the middle. In no-man's land. Between the east and the west. We’re unaligned. Radio Free Europe ended in Prague and the Komintern started in Albania. Our art was in service of the state and our state was in service of the people, while our people were in service of the state. Like John Nada. But we grew up, letting our history go, embracing the future and daring to go where no man has gone before.