The Cuenca Art Biennial (Ecuador)

With 17 curators and more artists from Ecuador: this is how the Cuenca Biennial will celebrate its 40th anniversary
Quito, Dec 13 (EFE).- The Cuenca Art Biennial (Ecuador), one of the most prominent in Latin America, will celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2025 with the seventeenth edition entitled 'The Game', where it will bring together 17 curators, each with a different proposal that must be articulated through three artists, of which at least one of them will be Ecuadorian, to recover this contest as a space to promote national creators.
"Within the biennials, being 40 years old is like coming of age," said the director of the Cuenca Biennial, Hernán Pacurucu, in an interview with EFE, who claimed the longevity of the Ecuadorian event compared to other short-lived biennials in different Latin American cities.

"The Cuenca Biennial has had very critical moments, it has been on the verge of disappearing," recalled Pacurucu, who attributed its resilience to the shift it made from painting to contemporary art and the affection it generates within the city's population, because "Cuenca is no longer perceived without a biennial."
The director pointed out that "the Biennial becomes a moment of celebration for the city." The 2023-2024 edition was held in 27 spaces in the city, including museums, heritage houses and private galleries.

Precisely, this identification of the city with its Biennial has allowed its survival over time with a low budget that, according to Pacurucu, is not even 10% of the budget managed by the Sao Paulo Biennial (Brazil), the most important in the region.
"We cannot pay the mega-salaries of the curators that are becoming more and more exorbitant, but we have managed to make the Biennial the second most important in Latin America," said Pacurucu.

This is the only way to explain why the next edition, the 17th, of the Cuenca Biennial will bring together 17 curators, one for each edition. "We have managed to get 17 of the best curators in the world to come to this edition. In the sixteen editions there has been only one curator who was in charge of selecting the artists," recalled Pacurucu.

"Today we are maintaining a totally experimental process that has attracted the attention of curators in the world, with a model of micro-curatorships in various settings in the city," he added.

Among the curators mentioned by Pacurucu who will participate in 'The Game' are the former Minister of Culture of Paraguay Ticio Escobar; the creator of the Havana Biennial, Gerardo Mosquera; the Spanish philosopher and art critic Fernando Castro Flórez, as well as the Dominican Ezequiel Taveras.

"We made the selection based on the fact that these theorists have changed the Latin American scene and thought since the 90s. (...) All of them have generated aesthetics of thought with books that all art students have read. They are world references," he stressed.

Each of the 17 will have to choose three artists to express their proposal, where at least one of the three must be Ecuadorian.

For this, the Cuenca Biennial opened a call for Ecuadorian artists, who can send their presentations until December 31 to be part of the list that will be made available to the curators for their selection.

"We are entering a process in Ecuador that is much more democratic. As a Biennial we cannot decide for the curators. We want to create a database that will go directly to the 17 curators. We are not going to permeate anything. It goes directly to the curators," reiterated the director.

Both the curators and the artists will receive context about the spaces where their works will be exhibited to adapt them to their history and the dynamics of the city's memory, and thus "the game" will take place, where in addition to the usual prizes for artists there will also be one for the best curatorial proposal.

"Welcome 'to the game'. 'The Game' is the common denominator and the guiding thread that will energize all the curatorships. Normally the curator is a pyramid that is at the top and makes the artists play for a prize. Here the Biennial is higher up and makes the curators play for a prize," said Pacurucu.

The public will also give a prize, to "recover that connection even more between the Biennial and the city." "It is useless for the Biennial to be a cloister in Cuenca where nobody enters," said the director of the Biennial, who has also sought to promote local artists and hold cultural activities throughout the year in its halls. EFE
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