#00Bienal de La Habana

This chapter examines the #00Bienal de La Habana (#00BH) as a critical intervention in the landscape of global biennial culture. Emerging in response to the Cuban government’s cancellation of the 13th Havana Bienal, #00BH was organized independently by artists and curators as an act of resistance to state control and cultural gatekeeping. Building on Ranjit Hoskote’s framework of “biennials of resistance,” this chapter theorizes biennial resistivity as an ongoing, processual mode of disruption that reconfigures spatial, temporal, and institutional hierarchies. Through a close analysis of #00BH, the chapter demonstrates how the event operated as both an aesthetic and theoretical challenge to the dominant Eurocentric historiography of biennials. Resisting the linear temporality embedded in the “waves” model of biennial history, #00BH foregrounds simultaneity, anachronism, and transregional solidarity. In doing so, it mobilizes a decolonial curatorial logic that unsettles extractive exhibition practices and reclaims civic space for plural forms of artistic expression. This analysis positions #00BH not merely as an exception or local anomaly, but as a generative site for rethinking the historiographical, political, and epistemological conditions under which biennials emerge and endure.