This course examines the international mega-exhibition of contemporary art as a form of worldmaking. We investigate key moments and debates within its broader history, ranging from 19th century world’s fairs and the earliest international art biennials, to the explosion of recurring mega-exhibitions in the 1990s. We will look at how such exhibitions advance various models for articulating difference, conflict, exchange, experience, and intersubjectivity, as well as how they negotiate tense and sometimes complicit relationships with the expanding art market. We will examine how the proliferation of contemporary art sites came hand-in-hand with newly migratory or geographically dispersed exhibitions. And we will consider how individual works of art and artists fare within exhibitionary and curatorial logics writ large. How do such exhibitions both reproduce and resist the economic and political logic of globalization? What are the particular urgencies of constructing or negating a world picture from the perspective of the periphery? How might art represent or enact new configurations of transnationalism such as the “global south” or planetary connectivity such as “the anthropocene”? A central component of the course is a field trip over fall recess to visit the 32nd São Paulo Bienal, titled “Live Uncertainty.”