The 55th Venice Biennale Taiwan Pavilion 
This is not a Taiwan Pavilion
Preview: 29 May – 31 May 2013
Venue: Palazzo delle Prigioni, Castello 4209, San Marco, Venice, Italy
Website: www.venicebiennaletaiwan.org

Artist: Bernd Behr | Chia-Wei Hsu | Kateřina Šedá + BATEŽO MIKILU
Curator: Esther Lu

This project manifests shared concerns for the urgency of coexistence in today’s world. By shaping an image of the stranger, the project attempts to capture the political relations between imagination and reality, and to investigate how the possibility of criticality produced in subjectification or estrangement might be used to perceive diverse potential forms of cultural identity.

Different strangers alienated by various political, economic, and cultural causes are brought forth in three art projects that attempt to go beyond the restraints of reality to reenact the problematic of identity in the present tense. Bernd Behr’s Chronotopia draws on several parallel historical materials from the twentieth-century Taiwan to explore the idea of an abandoned future and questions of historiography. Chia-Wei Hsu’s mixed media installation Marshal Tie Jia creates a new mythology of representation by deconstructing the production relations of image, culture, and history in communication with the divine world. Kateřina Šedá challenges the possibility of the exchange of perception in her deterritorialized topological approach to the contexts of the Taiwan Pavilion and a dysfunctional industrial town in the Czech Republic through collaborative actions.