Biennalist is an art format by French-Danish artist Thierry Geoffroy/ Colonel.

The format is a concurrent commentary on the themes of biennales.Biennalists are intent on investigating the themes or titles of art biennales/ other cultural events, and in doing so, questions the conceptual value and content of the exhibition, with a naivety that serves to expose weakness and discrepancies between the intentions of Biennale's themes and the resulting Biennales. Biennalists attend the Biennales and 'test' their propositions while they are ongoing, in the form of "guerrilla-style actions", debates, and interventions on-site.These actions often bring to light financial or political motivations behind the Biennale.The format often converges with other formats of Geoffroy's, such as Emergency Room or the Awareness Muscle. Biennalist has been activated at the Venice Biennale since 1999, Rotterdam Biennale 1990, Uturn Quadriennale 2008, Istanbul Biennale 2007 and the Athens Biennales 2007 and 2011; the Sydney Biennale 2010 and the Berlin Biennale in 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2018.[5] It has also been activated on invitation at the Sarema Biennale 1997, Casablanca Biennale 2018, Manifesta Murcia , Manifesta Palermo and Liverpool Biennial 2010.

Biennalist can be seen as a way to question the structure of the Biennale. Biennales attract a huge wealth of artists and curators from influential institutions and often associate themselves with progressive, critical themes that seem to engage with the predominant humanitarian and societal issues. Biennalist questions the legitimacy of these themes and what function the artists have within these frames, investigating whether the Biennale is as concerned with these issues as they portray themselves to be. Biennalist is often an organised team effort, with artists and curators being "recruited" by Geoffroy.Biennalist is seen as a necessary format, a slogan attached to the format is "There is not a good biennale without Biennalist."

Examples

There are a great range in Biennalist actions, often they are of an improvisational or guerrilla tactical nature.Geoffroy describes embarrassment and awkwardness as having an awareness activating quality to them,and Biennalist actions can be seen as possessing a deliberate "uncoolness", provocative to the chic, curated presentations of artwork found in Biennales. There is a quality of defying the elite and distanced nature of art output that Biennales possess, which have become more of a networking platform in recent years. One example of a Biennalist intervention is 'Penetration', here Geoffroy will ask artists if they want to share their space with another artist, sometimes Geoffroy himself gives the space or asks someone else to exhibit his work in their space.A specific example of this took place at Manifesta 8 in Murcia. This biennale had the theme, "A Dialogue with North Africa" and yet only 7 of the 116 participating artists were from North Africa.Geoffroy who was invited and had been given an old prison cell to exhibit his work in, turned this into a penetration space and offered it to any North African artist who wished to exhibit their artwork at the biennale.Biennalist was also activated at the Athens Biennale 2010, as part of a exhibition on Biennalist with the ZKM museum, in the form of Geoffroy recording his interventions on-location, including exploring the intentions of the biennale by interviewing the lead curators of the Biennale, including Nicolas Bourriaud.

Venice Biennale

At the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, Geoffroy was given space in the Zimbabwe Pavilion and was part of the Maldives pavilion representations.For the Maldives pavilion, he used one of his famous tent artworks to question the response to climate change, something of particular relevance in the context of the Maldives, whose low land levels risk going underwater due to rising sea levels. He also made use of the Emergency Room Mobile format (a moving variation of the Emergency Room format), to pose the question, "can emergencies be ranked?". He also got permission to place a tent in-between the Israeli and USA pavilions, with the statement "Can a nation welcome another nation” spraypainted on it.

During a previous Venice Biennale, Geoffroy organised events such as the Curator Lifting Running Competition, where Geoffroy invited artists to race with curators on their backs, as a way to question the hierarchy between artist and curators in such events.Another example is called Rumeur, which involves participants speaking loudly on their mobile phones or in person to one another, in crowded locations in the Biennales, speaking of made up parties and art events, in order to circulate humourous misinformation.

Documenta

Biennalist has been active at Documenta Kassel and Athens. Through the placing of tent artworks, as well as by engaging art critics, curators, artists and visitors in conversation and debate, Geoffroy questions Documenta's purpose and role, specifically in reference to its relationship to the weapon industry. He has also questioned their strategy in hosting Documenta in other locations, such as Athens and Kabul.Some statements on the tents include "The next Documenta should be curated by tanks", "I am not working for the tourism office" and most famously, "The Emergency will replace the Contemporary", which was removed from the front of the Fridericianum by Documenta.Biennalist also points out the "Botox effect" of Documenta, how an event can seem to be socio-politically conscious but causes a distracting effect from actual issues. One of these tents, "The Emergency will replace the Contemporary" was bought by the Kunsthalle Mannheim and is part of their permanent collection It was exhibited in front of the Edouard Manet painting, "The Execution of Emperor Maximilian", a painting which Geoffroy has often used as an example of the artist being "too late", depicting the accident.