Exhibition Dates：September 10, 2016 to February 5, 2017
Venue：1F– 2F Gallery, TFAM
Guest curator：Corinne Diserens
The Taipei Biennial 2016 proposes to explore differentpractices of thought, the invention of discursive and performative apparatuses,and the production of models and images leading to heterogeneous narrationsallowing trans-disciplinary artistic experiences bound to a ‘critical intimacy’between the artwork and the visitor. In doing so, it unravels relations toarchiving or anti-archival gestures and modes of memorization, to theirreadings and usage, to their potential appropriations, taking in considerationhistorical and cultural paradigm shifts. Through acts of deciphering andactivation, the biennial embraces the catalytic role of museums in navigatingbetween knowledge systems.
The biennial’s configuration will encompass visual arts,dance, performance, cinema, and writing with historical evocations, editorialplatforms, symposiums, and workshops to take place in the museum as well as incultural venues, theaters and the universities of Taipei as a means toestablish collaborations and stimulate a local synergy.
To reflect on societal frames and artisticexperimentations, the biennial will adopt a speculative approach to somequestions posed by anthropologist David Graeber in his book Utopia ofRules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy: how toformulate a coherent critique of institutional bureaucracy and its structuralviolence in such a way that human imagination and radical thought do not losetheir vital center; how to disarm configurations of power, including asproposed by artist Peter Friedl “the power of display,” and how the state ofconsciousness with which something is produced creates a liberated zone.
This allows a constellation of artistic proposalsresonating with:
performing the archives,
performing the architecture,
performing the retrospective,
the collective body,
the conquest of space,
the labor of ruins,
the public sphere.
The exhibition will offer a space embracing debates andreconfiguring the logic of what is shared, of the common, a site for publicstaging where art is experienced as the production of narratives with a firmgrip on historical conditions and realities that play along or resist,realities to come, or whose advent is impossible. It investigates how themuseum invents various modi operandi to deal with thetransmission of artistic heritage in the enlarged context of the history ofmodernity, the amplification of reception of ideas and gestures, in relation toconstantly evolving acts and forms seeking emancipation.
Formore information, please check TaipeiBiennial Website
