The Bienal de Cuenca is the principal contemporary art biennial of Ecuador and one of the three continuing international biennial institutions of Spanish-speaking Latin America, after the Havana Biennial (founded 1984) and within a programming horizon roughly contemporary with the Cuenca-region biennial circuit that grew up across the late 1980s and 1990s. It was founded in 1987 by the Cuencan painter and museologist Eudoxia Estrella — also founding director of the Museo Municipal de Arte Moderno de Cuenca — as a national and regional painting biennial, under a system of so-called representaciones nacionales by which participating countries formally selected and submitted artists. The painting framework held across the institution's first decade, after which the Bienal opened progressively to other media; the painting-only framing held formally until the institution's transition through the 2000s, and the model of national representations remained in place up to and including the 10th edition in 2009.
The 17th edition opened on 24 October 2025 under the title The Game: A Biennial of Biennials — an explicit institutional retrospective in which the programme treats its own forty-year curatorial record as the subject of the exhibition. Each of seventeen invited curators (a number matching the institution's edition count) selects three artists, at least one Ecuadorean. The result is a federation of seventeen miniature curated exhibitions across the city's museum and convent network, with fifty-one artists distributed across the institutional architecture of the centro histórico. The curatorial panel for the 2025 edition includes the Cuban critic Gerardo Mosquera (whose project La noche bella no deja dormir received the edition's award for best curatorial team), the Paraguayan critic and former Minister of Culture Ticio Escobar, the Chilean critic Justo Pastor Mellado, the Spanish-Mexican curator Virginia Roy, the Colombian curator Santiago Rueda and others — a curatorial geography that maps Cuenca's continuing institutional dialogue with the Hispanic-American biennial world from Asunción to Havana to Mexico City to Santiago.
An institution rebuilt out of a painting competition
The structural feature that distinguishes the Bienal de Cuenca from the older Bienal de São Paulo (founded 1951 in the Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo at Ibirapuera) and from the Havana Biennial (founded 1984 at the Wifredo Lam Center) is the slow institutional transformation by which a national painting competition under the system of national representations became, across two and a half decades, a curatorially federated international contemporary art biennial. The 10th edition in 2009 was the institutional hinge: it still operated under the national-representations model, but introduced for the first time the role of a general curator (the Cuban critic José Manuel Noceda), the curatorial framing that within two further editions would entirely replace the older diplomatic model. The 11th edition appointed three curators — Agnaldo Farias (Brazil), Fernando Castro Flórez (Spain) and Katya Cazar (Ecuador) — each organising a self-contained exhibition and selecting artists directly, the institutional precursor to the multi-curator federations of the 17th edition. The 12th edition in 2014, Ir para volver (Leaving to Return), under the joint curatorship of Jacopo Crivelli Visconti and Manuela Moscoso, completed the transition to a single thematic curatorship of international standing.
From the 13th edition in 2016 onward, the Bienal de Cuenca has run a single-general-curator model. Dan Cameron (the American curator and founding director of Prospect New Orleans) curated the 13th edition under the title Impermanencia — Mutable Art in a Materialist Society; the Venezuelan-American curator Jesús Fuenmayor curated the 14th in 2018–19 as Living Structures: Art as a Plural Experience, an edition that took its title and net-like organising metaphor from a 1969 artwork of the same name and that distributed its programme across dozens of venues in the historic centre. The 15th edition in 2021, Bienal del Bioceno: Cambiar el verde por azul (Biennial of the Biocene: Change the Green to Blue), under the Spanish curator Blanca de la Torre, was structured around an ecological and climate-justice argument organised along three axes — ancestral knowledge, ecofeminisms and futurible scenarios — and was the institution's first edition to take environmental crisis as its central organising frame. The 16th edition in 2023–24, Quizá mañana (Maybe Tomorrow), curated by the Spanish-Catalan critic Ferran Barenblit, ran from 8 December 2023 to 8 March 2024 and held the single-curator model into the present cycle. The 17th edition's deliberate fragmentation of that single-curator model — seventeen curators for seventeen editions — is the institutional argument the 2025 programme makes against the centripetal pull of any one curatorial voice and for the federated model that the institution's own history records.
