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Grand Opening of the Taipei Biennial 2016: A New Lexicon for the Biennial

Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future: A New Lexicon for the Biennial

With Dareen ABBAS, Lawrence ABU HAMDAN, Saâdane AFIF, John AKOMFRAH, Francis ALŸS, anarchive, Sven AUGUSTIJNEN & Hannah RYGGEN, CHANG Teng-Yuan, CHEN Chieh-jen, Eric CHEN & Rain WU, Fei-hao CHEN, I-Hsuen CHEN, CHIANG Kai-chun, Tiffany CHUNG, Tacita DEAN, Manon de BOER, Ângela FERREIRA, Peter FRIEDL, Valeska GERT, Kyungah HAM, James T. HONG, Chia-Wei HSU, Li-Hui HUANG, HUANG Mingchuan, Po-Chih HUANG, Yi-Chen HUNG, IM Heung-soon, siren eun young jung, Bahman KIAROSTAMI, KAO Jun-Honn, KUO Yu-Ping, Latifa LAÂBISSI & I-Fang LIN & Christophe WAVELET, I-Chern LAI, Yi-Chih LAI, LÊ Thị Kim Bạch, Xavier LE ROY, Hsu-Pin LEE, James Ming-Hsueh LEE, Pierre LEGUILLON, Minouk LIM, River LIN, LIN Yi-Wei, Chih-Hung LIU, Vincent MEESSEN, Christine MEISNER, Santu MOFOKENG, Jean-Luc MOULÈNE, Reinhard MUCHA, Pages Magazine, PARK Chan-Kyong, PEN Sereypagna & The Vann Molyvann Project, PEN Varlen, Jo RACTLIFFE, Ella RAIDEL, Yvonne RAINER, Shubigi RAO, Ad REINHARDT, Walid SADEK, Anri SALA, Alexander SCHELLOW, Shake, Nida SINNOKROT, Penny SIOPIS, SU Yu Hsien, Nasrin TABATABAI & Babak AFRASSIABI, TING Chaong-Wen & Yannick DAUBY, TRẦN Lương, TRƯƠNG Công Tùng, Po-Hao TSENG & Lecture of Ghost, Hong-Kai WANG, WANG Mo-Lin & Blacklist Studio & AU Sow-Yee, Christophe WAVELET, Witkacy, WU Chi-Yu & SHEN Sum-Sum & Musquiqui Chihying, Paola YACOUB, YEH Wei-Li & YEH Shih-Chiang.

With contributions from more than 80 artists, Taipei Fine Arts Museum and guest curator Corinne Diserens will present a rich, five-month long artistic program interweaving exhibitions, performances, screenings, symposiums, readings, conferences, and workshops in on-going collaborations with various cultural and educational Taiwanese institutions.[1]

Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future aims to explore the museum’s catalytic role in navigating between knowledge systems and in the experience of trans-artistic practices and research in societal configurations that take into consideration cultural paradigm shifts. Treating the biennial as a matrix, an organic whole with its various forms, intensities, rhythms, and traces, it engages “performing the archives, performing the architecture, performing the retrospective” and the invention of narrative apparatuses and reflexive images in relation to artistic productions and practices of thought with a firm grip on historical conditions and realities, which play along with or resist realities to come, or whose advent is impossible.

With works that aim to keep alive the collective, imaginary memory of potentially yet to be revealed images, the biennial proposes to unravel relations to archiving or anti-archival gestures and modes of memorization in an effort to shed light on their readings/usage and potential appropriations, considering that their geneses are closely bound to a “critical intimacy” between the artwork and the spectator/visitor. Doing so, it aims to contribute to a coherent critique of institutional bureaucracy so that radical thought does not lose its vital center and ability to disarm configurations of power, thereby unlocking human imagination out of dead zones to explore heterogeneous narratives and allow common memory to disseminate and settle.

The biennial’s program offers a space embracing artistic experimentations and debates with various publics, reconfiguring the logic of what is shared, a site for public staging in relation to an idea of art as well as to evolving acts and forms seeking emancipation from the dominant narratives that rule social life.