Human activity has been transforming the planet for millennia. All the ecosystems now bear the mark of human presence, but the scale and speed of change in the last 60 years, called by scientists The Great Acceleration, also led them to name anthropocene this new geological epoch — an era marked by the strong impact of human activities upon the atmospherical and geological evolution of planet earth.
Taipei Biennial 2014 uses this image in order to examine how contemporary art adresses this new contract between human beings, animals, vegetals, machines, products and objects. How does today’s art define and represent our space-time ? The exhibition will highlight the way artists focus on links, chainings, connections and mutations : how they envision planet earth as a huge network, where new states of matter and new forms of relations appear…
To describe capitalism in the 19th century, Karl Marx talked about a “ghost dance” pulling along the humans, their products and their environment. Reification on one side (the transformation of the living into an object) and prosopopeia on the other (a figure of speech that represents an object or a dead person speaking) are the two major patterns of the new « ghost dance » of global economy. But in addition to these two figures, we could add montage, as a connection principle between heterogeneous realities.
The sphere of inter-human relations cannot be conceived anymore without its environmental and technological sides. Since the beginning of the XXIst century, contemporary artists tend to renegociate their relationships with both technosphere and biosphere, exploring the knots that link the living and the object, the machine and the body, the technological and the social – and experiencing their interdependence.
The uprising of a new « global spirituality » in art appears in the focus made on outsiders and occult forms in the last Venice Biennial, or in the recent calls for an « animist » state of mind in the arts. In the theoretical field, Bruno Latour calls for a « parliament of things », while a recent philosophical movement, « Speculative realism », criticizes anthropocentrism and the notion of « human finitude » so present in western thought : for those philosophers, thinking and being are not correlated, and the human individual does not have any preeminent position in the access to being. Quentin Meillassoux even rejects the necessity of all physical laws of nature, and Graham Harman considers everything as an object, whether physical, fictional, living or inert. Others, like François Jullien, reexamines western philosophy in a critical way, by confronting its basic concepts to chinese thought, in which he identifies new potentialities.
This movement of cross-pollenization, both cultural and techno-scientific, might lead us to a possible global refoundation of aesthetics, and it will be at the heart of Taipei Biennial 2014. The exhibition will adress the cross-overs appearing in the art of the anthropocene ; it will focus on artists for whom objects, products, computers, screens, chemistry, natural elements or living organisms are interconnected with humans, and can be used by them for a critical analysis of contemporary world.
