Twenty years on ... inside, out.(Liminalities: Discussions on the Global and the Local)(cross cultural developments and their effect on art curators)

Just before Christmas London was reverberating with endless renditions of an old Wham! hit: "Last Christmas I gave her my heart./The very next day,/she gave it away." Just before Christmas, a number of us went to INIVA, Britain's Institute of International Visual Arts, which was founded in London a few years ago under the sponsorship of the Arts Council of Great Britain to explore new frameworks of "internationalism" in the arts - not the great touring exhibition variant but the oblique movements of transnational, displaced, and diasporic influence of culture on the move. We went to hear two South African artists, Premi Chakravarti and Clifford Charles, speak about their perceptions of the recent Second Johannesburg Biennale. Describing the impact of the last horrific years of the reign of apartheid politics on the cultural life of South Africa, they showed images of Johannesburg - the evacuation of its center by the rich whites who have moved to barricaded suburbs north of the city and its takeover by masses of migrant poor who have come in from enforced residence in country townships and transformed the streets into a teeming marketplace. They described the nascent culture of urban paranoia that has accompanied these metropolitan demographic changes, in which such population shifts are deemed inherently dangerous and viewed as the abandonment of modernist progress to the implied chaos of another way of inhabiting the city. They spoke of the exorbitant cost of the specially built exhibition hall and the cost of entry within the context of a depressed and turbulent economy. They questioned the importance of bringing all those international artists to a beleaguered and tortured moment of cultural politics and wondered whether there was a context in which these imported luminaries could actually be read and interpreted. They enacted for us the full complexity of receiving the Biennale …