Taipei Biennial 2018 Announces Participating List

7th September 2018 – Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) is pleased to announce an international participating list of 41 participants and participating groups from 19 countries and territories for the 11th edition of the Taipei Biennial, taking place from November 17, 2018 to March 10, 2019 at Taipei Fine Arts Museum. 

Co-curated by Mali Wu and Francesco Manacorda with the title Post-Nature—A Museum as an Ecosystem, the biennial will focus on the interconnectivity of ecosystemic structures formed between humans and nature, and aims to serve as a platform for social experimentation, generating new interdisciplinary possibilities for long-lasting, community-driven, bottom-up synergies. 

Taking this title as their starting point, the curators will approach the ever-changing nature of an ecosystem to explore how this is reflected in artistic and institutional practice. The exhibition will engage with different ecosystemic models, focusing particularly on the significance of reciprocal dependency, and how this form of functioning tends towards a holistic common good. While the exhibition venue, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, will act as the Biennial’s central nervous system, the experimental methodology of this exhibition will transform the museum into a platform for multi-disciplinary discussion, which intends to extend outward and reach multilateral resonance outside of the architectural limits of the museum.

In Post-Nature—A Museum as an Ecosystem, the curators will use the exhibition to reconsider the museum as a social model. In the most conventional forms, exhibitions grow quickly, occupy a limited time span, and have little ability to sustain their reach, while museums instead develop slowly and organically, respond carefully to their environments and preserve their own longevity. The curators mention, if too rigidly confined by an architectural and conceptual framework, a museum can become an isolated space for art contemplation, rather than remain open to constant ecosystemic transformation, osmosis and growth. With the curatorial concept and the participating projects responding to it, this biennial aims to investigate how the museum as an institution exists as, and within, a social, cultural, economic and political ecosystem.

The curators have included not only visual artists, but also NGOs, activists, film and documentary makers, architects and other non-visual artists, in a network of interdependent and cross-pollinating positions. By presenting non-traditional creatives in the museum’s galleries, the curators aim to enhance the discussion and the exchange of knowledge, responding to the diversity and possibilities of ecology. 

The list of participants and participating groups are: Ruangsak ANUWATWIMON; Martha ATIENZA; AU Sow-Yee; Ursula BIEMANN; Alexey BULDAKOV; Huai-Wen CHANG+MAS Micro Architecture Studio; Ting-Tong CHANG; Jui-Kuang CHAO+Tainan Community University; Julian CHARRIÈRE; CHEN Chu-Yin+Solar Insects Vivarium Workshop; Lucy DAVIS; ET@T; Laila Chin-Hui FAN; Futurefarmers; Tue GREENFORT; Ingo GÜNTHER; Henrik HÅKANSSON; Helen Mayer HARRISON & Newton HARRISON; Jeffrey HOU & Dorothy TANG; HSIAO Sheng-Chien; HUANG Hsin-Yao; Indigenous Transitional Justice Class, Taiwan; KE Chin-Yuan + “Our Island”; KHVAY Samnang; Kuroshio Ocean Education Foundation; Candice LIN; Zo LIN—Weed Day; Duane LINKLATER; Nicholas MANGAN; Jumana MANNA; Museum of Nonhumanity; Mycelium Network Society; Open Green; Allan SEKULA; Rachel SUSSMAN; Vivian SUTER; Keelong River Watch Union; The Thousand Miles Trail Association; WU Ming-Yi; Robert ZHAO Renhui and ZHENG Bo.  (In alphabetical order)

Mali Wu

Mali Wu (1957, Taiwan) is an artist, curator and lecturer. Wu currently teaches in the Graduate Institute of Interdisciplinary Art at National Kaohsiung Normal University. She graduated from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (the Arts Academy of the City of Düsseldorf) in Germany. Wu’s artistic practice and research focuses on what art can do in the public sphere. In the 1990s, she started to criticize the state of social and political affairs from a feminist perspective in her works. She has launched a series of community-based projects of new public art, including the participatory art workshop “Playing with Clothes” organized by Awakening Foundation as part of Awake in Your Skin (2000-2004), which reversed the tradition of women’s needlework and discussed women’s lives through clothes and weaving; Art as Environment: A Cultural Action on the Tropic of Cancer (2005-2007) in Jiayi County which promoted equality of cultural participation rights in rural areas; By the River, on the River, of the River – A Community Based Eco-Art Project (2006); Restore Our Rivers and Mountains – Along the Keelung River, a collaboration with a community college attempting to stimulate discussion about rivers and current environmental issues; and Art as Environment: A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek, a collaborative project with Bamboo Curtain Studio which re-examined urban ecology and development through an ignored creek. She won the 11th Taishin Visual Art Award in 2013 with Art as Environment: A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek and the 19th National Award of Art, Taiwan in 2016. Wu has consistently dealt with ecological issues by adopting art as an approach to bridge culture and nature, demonstrating the potential for contemporary art and the vital personal energy of an artist.

Francesco Manacorda

Francesco Manacorda (1974, Turin, Italy) is currently artistic director of the V-A-C Foundation and visiting professor at LJMU School of Art and Design in Liverpool. He earned a degree in education from the University of Turin (2000) and an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London (2001-2003). As an experienced art writer, he has published articles and reviews in publications such as Artforum, Domus, Flash Art, Frieze, Metropolis M, Mousse, Piktogram, Kaleidoscope and ArtReview. He has edited numerous publications and written critical monographs on several artists’ works. Between 2007 and 2009 he served as curator at the Barbican Art Gallery, where he realized the large-scale exhibitions Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art and Radical Nature – Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009 (2009). In 2007 he curated the Slovenian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale and in 2009 the New Zealand Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, while in 2013 he was a member of the International Jury for the 55th Venice Biennale. His curatorial practice has also included freelance projects such as Subcontinent – The Indian Subcontinent in Contemporary Art, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, Italy (2006). From February 2010 to March 2012, he was director of Artissima, the international fair of contemporary art in Turin, and from 2012 to 2017 he was artistic director of Tate Liverpool where he curated exhibitions such as Mondrian and His Studios; Glenn Ligon: Encounter and Collisions; An Imagined Museum; Leonora Carrington: Transgressing Discipline; and Cathy Wilkes. In 2016 he co-curated the Liverpool Biennial. He was visiting lecturer in exhibition history and critical theory at the curating contemporary art department of the Royal College of Art, London from 2006 to 2011. 

About the Taipei Biennial

The Taipei Biennial is the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s most important exhibition, held once every two years since 1998. Dedicating to the development of Taiwan’s contemporary art and to increasing its international visibility, the Taipei Biennial employs diverse cultural perspectives to place Taipei within the network of Asian and global contemporary art, serving as a driving force for international dialogue. Responding to international art trends with both depth and breadth, it attempts to build direct connections between the local and international art communities. Over the past two decades, it has rapidly grown and amassed energy to become a major mechanism of dialogue between Taiwan and the world. https://www.taipeibiennial.org/ 

About Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Founded in 1983 as Taiwan’s first museum of modern and contemporary art, Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) celebrates its 35th anniversary this year. Located in Taipei, the museum occupies over 20,000 square meters of space, of which 11,741 square meters are devoted to exhibitions. The inception of the TFAM was a response to the budding movement of modern art in Taiwan. Over the past decades, TFAM has dedicated itself to the development of modern art in Taiwan while staying abreast of ongoing trends in contemporary art. 

TFAM has been participating in La Biennale di Venezia since 1995 and has been hosting the Taipei Biennial since 1998, inviting internationally-renowned curators and artists to cooperate with the local artistic circle. The shows held over the past decades have increased the visibility of Taiwan and expanded its global networks on the world stage. www.tfam.museum 

Taipei Biennial 2018
Post-Nature—A Museum as an Ecosystem
Date：17 November 2018–10 March 2019
Venue：Taipei Fine Arts Museum