Abstract
Arguably the 24th Bienal de São Paulo, also known as the bienal da antropofagia, is the most
internationally celebrated edition of the Brazilian biennial. Curated by Paulo Herkenhoff in 1998,
the exhibition was acknowledged in the international press as shifting the focus of the Bienal de
São Paulo away from its earlier international model based on the Biennale di Venezia toward a
more geopolitical, Southern one closer to the Havana Biennial. Famously, Herkenhoff mobilized
the modernist concept of cultural cannibalism (anthropophagy) coined by Brazilian intellectual
Oswald de Andrade in 1928 to make a commentary of contemporary art, placing Brazil at the
center of the exhibition.
This article revisits this celebrated exhibition to consider it not as an isolated curatorial tour-de-
force, but as deeply inserted in its historical moment (i.e., post-multiculturalism in a decade
marked by neoliberalism and biennalization) and stemming from transformations in the very São
Paulo Biennial, which had been uplifted monetarily and curatorially by the two previous
exhibitions (the 22nd and 23rd editions curated by Nelson Aguilar). Ultimately, it also surveys
how this show contributed to the internationalization of the national concept of anthropophagy
and of Brazilian artists associated with it.