With contributions from more than eighty artists, the Taipei Biennial 2016 presents a rich, five-month long artistic program interweaving exhibitions, performances, screenings, symposiums, readings, conferences, and workshops in ongoing 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 biennial’s exhibition conceived by Xavier Le Roy as a choreography of actions by fifteen Taiwanese performers in situations that investigate various experiences of the present as a composition of several times coexisting in the same time and space. “Retrospective” engages with excerpts from Le Roy’s solo works and biographical elements from each performer as well as the intersecting apparatuses of the theater and the museum. Throughout the Taipei Biennial, workshops are being organized with cultural and educational partners, and a rich program of performances will take place at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and other venues, including specially commissioned pieces for the biennial, demonstrating the collective capacity of artists to invent paths allowing trans-disciplinary experimentation. The Taipei Biennial Symposium, divided into three parts, will be held September 10–11, November 26–27, 2016, and January 13–15, 2017 . It aims to bring together a large public with artists, theorists, 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.
With the production, co-production, and presentation of a large number of new artworks, films and performances from Taiwanese, Asian, and international artists, the biennial has become a major actor in supporting contemporary art in Taiwan. Exploring historical coincidences and resonances, some invited artists are also proposing evocations and presentations, with visual, performative, or discursive configurations that engage with seminal artistic gestures and the corpuses of major artists of the last century that have nourished their own practices, including John Cage, Lygia Clark, Marcel Duchamp, Valeska Gert, Le Corbusier, Hannah Ryggen, Yvonne Rainer, Ad Reinhardt, Witkacy, and Shih-Chiang Yeh, among others. and researchers around lectures, presentations, discussions, screenings, musical events, and performances. Philosophers, historians, anthropologists, artists, writers, choreographers, filmmakers, and musicians will present their works, and share their research and ongoing projects. History and theory will not be regarded as entities separate from art practices but, on the contrary, as necessary and inherent to any relevant project in today’s artistic context. The symposium will draw from heterogeneous resources, exploring pedagogical prototypes, models, and formats.
Conceived as hospitable space-time, the exhibition Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, accompanied by a program of film screenings in the biennial’s “little cinema,” and the artist-in-residence project at Taipei Artist Village will open to the public on September 10, 2016. A number of other installations will be deployed in November, December, and January.
Starting on December 9, for a period of four weeks, the museum will host “Retrospective,” an exhibition within the biennial’s exhibition conceived by Xavier Le Roy as a choreography of actions by fifteen Taiwanese performers in situations that investigate various experiences of the present as a composition of several times coexisting in the same time and space. “Retrospective” engages with excerpts from Le Roy’s solo works and biographical elements from each performer as well as the intersecting apparatuses of the theater and the museum.
Throughout the Taipei Biennial, workshops are being organized with cultural and educational partners, and a rich program of performances will take place at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and other venues, including specially commissioned pieces for the biennial, demonstrating the collective capacity of artists to invent paths allowing trans-disciplinary experimentation.
The Taipei Biennial Symposium, divided into three parts, will be held September 10–11, November 26–27, 2016, and January 13–15, 2017. It aims to bring together a large public with artists, theorists, and researchers around lectures, presentations, discussions, screenings, musical events, and performances. Philosophers, historians, anthropologists, artists, writers, choreographers, filmmakers, and musicians will present their works, and share their research and ongoing projects. History and theory will not be regarded as entities separate from art practices but, on the contrary, as necessary and inherent to any relevant project in today’s artistic context. The symposium will draw from heterogeneous resources, exploring pedagogical prototypes, models, and formats.
The series of monthly conferences Kau-Puê x Photography Forum (September 17, October 22, November 19, December 17, 2016), organized with aesthetic theorist and art critic Gong Jow-Jiun, focuses, as part of an ongoing research project, on exploring images of religious folk festivals in the history of Taiwanese photography. Photographers, researchers, critics, and editors will be invited to reflect in a series of talks on Taoist-Buddhist religious folk images archiving performances and to examine them from alternative perspectives at variance with the stereotypical emphasis on individual photographers or the paradigm of modern western photography.
The Editorial is a critical editorial platform organized in collaboration with Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive and Vernacular. It will take place at the museum December 10–11, 2016. With a rich program of talks, readings, discussions, workshops, book launches, and publishing material, it considers the role and expanding network of independent art publishers in Asia, their local and international impact, and how hybrid publishing practices and ways of articulating and diffusing content, from artist books to the shifting roles of art libraries and their related archives, have been reshaped as sites of production, reception, and transmission.
Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future has been made possible by the extraordinary engagement of individual people and institutions. My warmest thanks goes first of all to the artists and speakers for their contributions and generosity, to the public and private institutions for their invaluable collaboration, loans, and support, to the people who welcomed me in Taiwan and shared their ideas and insights, and, last but not least, to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum for inviting me to curate this 10th biennial and dedicating such attention to enabling its programs to be fully deployed. I particularly thank the museum’s team for their unflagging work and continuous care.
1 Taipei Artist Village, Guling Street Avantgarde Theater, School of Dance at the Taipei National University of the Arts, Taipei Backstage Pool, Kishu An Forest of Literature, Cultural Affairs Bureau of Tainan City Government, Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA) / Research and Innovation Centre of Visual Art, Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive, Vernacular, and Motto Books, among others.
