CARE

The Care Pavilion at London Design Biennale will be directed by Song Tao and curated by Naiyi Wang, with Academic Advisor Dr. Jana Scholze and Exhibition Manager Siwei Li. The team will transform the Pavilion into an intimate space where care can be nurtured, and it will be open to the public from June 1–25, 2023 at Somerset House.

Care is ubiquitous, yet it is in a state of extreme crisis. Since 2020, the word “CARE” has taken on a very acute meaning in the global pandemic’s “state of exception.” We can see how questions of care, “caring for,” “caring about,” “caring with” come to register in many spheres. We have experienced “a discursive explosion of care” but have barely put collective care into practice. It’s essential to respond to these ever present yet newly urgent matters of care: thinking through care in its multiple forms—of humans and nonhumans—while addressing its intricacies.

With its theme “Care,” the Pavilion offers fertile ground for care-fully considering it through multiple forms, dimensions and perspectives. “We will invite interdisciplinary designers, activists, scholars, healers and cultural practitioners from around the globe to respond to “CARE,” using the Biennale as a testing ground to re-imagine the politics and ethics of care. Newly commissioned works will be displayed at the Biennale, while a publication, a documentary, and a series of gatherings will be held in conjunction with the exhibition, all of which are ways to practice alternative forms of collective caring” states the curatorial team.

Song Tao is a curator of design, architecture, and contemporary art. He is Founding Director of Yuan Museum and TAO Gallery. He has held numerous curatorial positions over the last 20 years, and curated exhibitions at Tianjin International Design Week, Beijing International Design Week, Triennale di Milano, Design Shanghai Xintiandi Design Festival, DongGuan Re-locate Design Festival, Guangzhou CIFF Design Spring, etc. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Shanghai Art Museum, Toronto Art Museum, China Cultural Center in Paris and Berlin.

Jana Scholze is a design curator. She is Associate Professor at the Kingston School of Art in London heading the MA Curating Contemporary Design in collaboration with the Design Museum. Her transdisciplinary research and publications cover questions around formats of interaction and contemporary design practice engaging with society, technology and the environment. She is a Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum where she has been previously the Curator of Contemporary and Modern Furniture and Product Design working on acquisitions and exhibitions, such as What is Luxury? (2015). She is one of the initiators of The Design Film Festival (2020) and co-curated an exhibition about domesticity for the XII International Design Biennial Saint-Etienne in 2021.

Naiyi Wang is a curator, currently lecturing in Design Criticism & Curatorial Studies at d-School of Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). She was appointed chief curator of Beijing Art and Technology Biennale (BATB) titled Synthetic Ecology (2022). She initiated Climate Care (2020–ongoing), an initiative dedicated to exploring the convergence of art, technology and climate change, while seeking to evoke action on the climate crisis in all its facets. She has co-curated Material Tales: The Life of Things (in collaboration with Design Museum London) in 2021. Previously, she has curated/co-curated exhibitions and projects at 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, CAFA Art Museum, Today Art Museum, London Design Festival, Milan Design Week, Stanley Picker Gallery (London), Flux Factory (New York), among many others.

Siwei Li is a designer, entrepreneur, brand strategy consultant, and sustainable investor, she founded 14ST Design Studio, a collection of engineers, scientists, and suppliers collaborating on micro-to-macro pragmatic and innovative ideas. Over the past eight years, she respectively founded MOOVI TECH (2016), an energy-conscious transportation brand that develops human-centered lightweight, ultra-portable tools for urban commuting and leisure, and ORGANY (2019), a sustainability-oriented brand that utilizes high-quality bioplastics to create modern homeware and accessories. Her socially-conscious products and practices work towards exploring alternative forms for sustainable futures.

The curatorial team aims to emphasize the necessity of curatorial support (infrastructure) to ensure that caring (whether for, about, or with) can really flourish. “We deploy ‘curating’—from the Latin word curare, meaning ‘to care’ and ‘to cure’—as a tool to radically expand and collectively reflect on the notion of care,” explain curators Song Tao and Naiyi Wang. “The Care Pavilion plays a special role by making multiple forms of care visible, serving as a practice of collective caring and curing that is accessible to everyone.”

The Care Pavilion manifests through the Care manifesto, Care publication, Care documentary, Collective-care initiatives and Care-full practices, where care—in all its complexities—will be re-imagined and re-collectivised through an intersectional perspective.

The list of the participants and the detailed programme of the Care Pavilion at London Design Biennale will be announced soon. For further information on curatorial themes and media inquiries, please contact Naiyi Wang at mail@wangnaiyi.com.

Care Pavilion
London Design Biennale 2023

Director: Song Tao
Academic Advisor: Dr. Jana Scholze
Curator: Naiyi Wang

Exhibition Manager: Siwei Li
Exhibition Design: Zhou You | Founder of Update Studio
Visual Design: Ye Qian | Founder of openAstudio

Ecological Collaborator: MOOVI
Special Support: Beying Tech Inc.