Historical Blinds and SITElines: Unsettling the Biennial with Candice Hopkins

Curator Candice Hopkins tends to take an untethered approach to working with institutions, keeping one foot in and the other out. She often works in roles where she is an advisor to or resident of the institution. This approach enables an important perspective—one that gives opportunities to challenge normal or traditional institutional models. For Hopkins, there is a stability to not being entirely tethered. Her curatorial roles at documenta 14, SITE Santa Fe, the forthcoming Canadian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale and her recently announced appointment at the Toronto Biennial are anchored in a collaborative and artist-centric framework of respect and reciprocity. And whether by choice or chance, Hopkins has found herself working with institutions open to structural shifts and change: both SITE Santa Fe and the Toronto Biennial are committed to re-thinking the format of the biennial. In particular, these two biennials offer great latitude around how, with what, where, when and by whom new institutional models are delivered.

Next to longer standing institutions, the biennial as a form finds its own stability by being untethered from traditional methods of exhibition, education and public programming practices. Rather than following previously successful models, the biennial projects in Toronto and Santa Fe have taken interest in challenging and expanding the ever-replicated structure of such frameworks.

SITE Santa Fe shows the possibility of shifting a successful institutional method into an unknown realm. When the SITE Santa Fe International Biennial was founded in 1995, it was the only international biennial in the United States and one of only a few worldwide. The two decades following the foundation of the SITE Biennial saw an exponential proliferation of biennials. In 2011, Irene Hoffmann, director of SITE Santa