Worldwide Apartment and Studio Biennale

In 2016 artist Anna Khodorkovskaya and curator and art critic Anna Buyvid founded Worldwide Apartment and Studio Biennale – the project developing a distinct approach to alternative exhibition solutions and independent artistic initiatives on exposing current art. Though there are more than 150 art biennials in the world, we thought we needed another one.

During the 1st WASBiennale, more than 70 art shows and events took place in artist studios, apartment galleries and even private residences all over the world at the same time. The programme showed artistic and curatorial practise with somewhat different backgrounds, approaches and goals. But what united all those projects was the search for distinct forms of representation.
Nowadays, an increasing number of art professionals are looking beyond the frameworks of the classical institutional approach. Worldwide Apartment and Studio Biennale is an independent formation, whose mission is to create an opportunity of innovative union and mobilise self-organising in the arts on a global scale.
WASBiennale invites members of the Word’s art community by offering a substantial platform and concept for DIY independent exhibition practice. Operating by the rules of traditional art biennials, we’ve started the first Biennale without limits.
Artist’s studios and apartment galleries as alternative exhibition spaces have rarely been included in popular art history. It is time to change it. WASBiennale will not just disclose undercurrents of contemporary art history to the general public, but foremost to create an opportunity to build parallels with the most recent developments in contemporary art, where again artists and curators are compelled to find alternative ways. And it’s probably the time to build up the next level: a critique of an institutional critique.

The headline of the first edition of WASBiennale: BE MY GUEST brought the idea of transforming boundaries, showing a decreasing approach of white-cube-based art space and inviting viewers to take a step into the intimate artist’s zone. Letting anyone in the artist’s studio, as well as inviting someone in your private space is a gesture of high confidence. Showing art in such format, involving the audience in direct dialogue, helping to reduce a gap and provide a new scale of artist/viewer communication.
The topic of the second edition of WASBiennale is WE RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY? It extends all the issues addressed by the Biennale in 2016, but also will proceed further with the exploring of the limits of public/personal in artistic space and practice at the end of the second decade of XXI century.