Taipei Biennial 2023: Small World

Taipei Biennial is pleased to announce the curatorial concept for the 13th edition of Taipei Biennial, running from November 18, 2023 to March 24, 2024 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). Curated by independent curator Freya Chou, writer and editor Brian Kuan Wood, and curator Reem Shadid, this year’s Taipei Biennial is titled “Small World”. In this iteration, a number of artists are selected to produce or premier new works including Pio Abad (London), Nadim Abbas (Hong Kong), Nesrine Khodr (Beirut), Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (Los Angeles), Lai Chi Sheng (Taipei), Li Yi Fan (Taipei), Jen Liu (New York), Natascha Sadr Haghighian (Berlin/Tehran), dj sniff  (Los Angeles/Tokyo), and Yang Chi Chuan (Taipei). 

On this edition’s curatorial ethos, the three curators say: “No matter what hell you have been through these past few years, you have most likely felt and seen endings become beginnings and beginnings abruptly end. You may have run for cover in the nearest enclosure, only to find yourself in a shrinking pod made of cameras and screens feeding your eyeballs and draining your energy. Perhaps it’s time to look under the tangle of pipelines and ask how we might render the menacing drone of automation as music, how to explore the unknown power of the ground just underneath our feet, which might underwrite a possibility for a new and more lyrical kind of life and creation.”

The 13th edition of Taipei Biennial will transform the Taipei Fine Arts Museum into a space of listening, gathering, improvising and exploring other ways to perceive and navigate recent lessons learned about the life that we really want. The exhibition will unfurl the compressed time of musical and cinematic capture and play back the part of our intimate lives swallowed into a planetary recording apparatus. It’s an invitation to recognize the intimate enclosure and embrace it, to surround your habitat and inhabit your surroundings; an invitation to break open the tensions and invert the scales, values, weights and measures. It’s an appeal to draw out the deathlike fatigue of systems fueled by chronic mistrust and reclaim a sense of clarity on skillfully buried conflicts and calamities that continue to seep into our organs, habits and soils.

As a departure from the 2018 and 2020 editions of Taipei Biennial (Post-Nature: A Museum as an Ecosystem and You and I don’t live on the same planet, respectively), which, with an omniscient perspective, tackled ecological issues and engaged in even deeper examination of the interactions, dynamics and diplomatic tactics between human and non-human world, the upcoming edition dives into the sensual experiences and deep tensions of individuals’ everyday lives regulated by the changing algorithm of the world, asking whether it holds capacity for new poetics. 

Jun-Jieh Wang, Director of TFAM, believes that the Taipei Biennial 2023 is charting another path for the biennial and looks very much forward to its presentation. He adds, “It brings a light touch to the issues we are facing in contemporary society, but at the same time profoundly questions how ones situate themselves when temporal and spatial conditions are constantly re-defined.” 

The CTBC Foundation for Arts and Culture, continues to be the lead sponsor of the exhibition, following its support to the 2020 edition.