I dedicate this onerous engagement to my daughter Gea (my pride
and my concern), because she feels that desire and utopia are the source
of life and impossible goals.

Questo gravoso impegno lo dedico a mia figlia Gea (mio orgoglio e
preoccupazione) perché senta che il desiderio e l'utopia sono fonte di vita
e di traguardi impossibili.

— Giancarlo Politi, June 2003.

The Prague Biennale is a new expression of an idea which has guided us for over thirty years: interpreting the process of understanding contemporary art through the collaboration of many voices and many eyes and through different cultures and sensibilities.

This Prague Biennale could be like an issue of Flash Art, our magazine, which has always opened the way for globalism through many voices and many experiences, with complete respect for local forms and cultures.

We have always maintained that it is not possible (and it would moreover be false) to read and interpret the contemporary through the eyes and sensibilities of one person alone. The complexity of the world lends itself to many interpretations and many visions, at times contradictory or incompatible, because the voices and the faces of our contemporary world and its complexity are indeed incompatible and contradictory.

In a certain sense the challenge of Flash Art in these years has been to conjugate the cultural claims of different and distant countries and of ethnically very diverse people and groups (at times deliberately and proudly different).
It is no accident that Flash Art has been the only magazine in the world that has attempted to be part of the process of globalization through its various editions (some shorter and some longer running) in German, French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, and Chinese: trying to understand better the complex debate on the current transformations in contemporary art.

It is true that globalization increasingly continues to reduce or lessen differences, but as far as possible Flash Art has always tried to detect these differences, even in their most ephemeral shades. For this reason Flash Art has never been a trendy magazine, but is rather a magazine of trends, with absolute respect for their protagonists.

So how can these complexities, the diversities and the divergences of today be interpreted through the single vision of a single curator (or two or three)? The deus ex machina of an exposition, a figure on to whom some still romantically hang (Harald Szeemann at the Biennale di Venezia, Okwui Enwezor at Documenta in Kassel), is no longer a viable model.

Interpreting a changing world through art calls for attention to details, to the margins, and thus to the peripheral areas that are moving towards becoming new centers.

Indeed, for some time Flash Art has been giving a voice and a body to these peripheral areas, and as soon as it was possible, we brought back these experiences from the field. This started with Aperto ‘93 at the Biennale di Venezia, where for the first time twelve curators from very different backgrounds (including a gallerist with a very unusual profile and a Chinese artist-curator) were called to co-curate the exposition.

It was on this occasion that the director of the current Biennale di Venezia, Francesco Bonami (at the time simply a contributor to Flash Art in New York) had his baptism as a curator. Aperto ’93 paved the way for a new concept of curating, which is fortunately taking hold today (witness this year’s Biennale di Venezia).

The experience Flash Art brought to Aperto ‘93 was then further realized at the Tirana Biennale in 2001, to which we invited 38 curators (including Maurizio Cattelan and Vanessa Beecroft in their first curatorial experiences). The result was an exposition which was truly open to all cultures and to all emerging artists.

The Prague Biennale aims to be an ideal continuation of that attempt to interpret the world, its constant changing, and the new trends emerging in the universe of art. It is a research with many voices and many attentive eyes scrutinizing a universe which is like incandescent magma, and which will be different tomorrow, different from today, different from yesterday.