‘Out of thin air’

Centring on the 9th Berlin Biennale: The Present in Drag (2016), the 6th Athens Biennale: ANTI (2018) and the 7th Athens Biennale: Eclipse (2021), this chapter traces the resurgence of the ‘cyborg’ in biennial exhibitions of contemporary art since the early 2010s. The chapter asks: why is it that in these biennials, human-machine relations appear as liberatory and so very magical? To answer this question, I reconstruct the new materialist principles that underscore the politics not only of the selected case studies but also of a proliferating number of exhibitions that, since around the early 2010s, have sought to re/turn to the materiality of life itself. I argue that the new materialist emphasis placed on concepts such as desire, difference, open-endedness and unpredictability obscures the reality of the totality of social relations. This lack is concretized in the absence of a sustained curatorial consideration of the global distribution of labour that renders technology emancipatory for the few and exploitative for many. Despite its promise to rectify postmodernism’s attention to discourse and fragmentation, this chapter argues that new materialism is an updated version of the poststructuralist strand of postmodernism. At stake are the ideological affinities of the mainstream centres of the contemporary art field; my analysis evinces that the apparent shift towards macroscopic, class-focused approaches in the early 2000s has not only been a minor but also a brief moment.