Taipei Biennial 2016: Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future

Press/professional preview: September 8–9
Other programs: Taipei Biennial performance / TFAM cinema: Date TBA
Taipei Biennial symposium: September 10–11, November 26–27, 2016 and January 14–15, 2017 
Conferences: September 17, October 1, November 19, December 17, 2016 - KAU-PUÊ x Photography: The Taipei Biennial Project
The Editorial: December 10–11, 2016; independent art publishing conference and book fair

Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) is pleased to announce the participating artists in the 10th edition of the Taipei Biennial to take place from September 10, 2016 to February 5, 2017.

Dareen Abbas, Saâdane Afif, John Akomfrah, Francis Alÿs, Anarchive, Sven Augustijnen & Hannah Ryggen, Teng-Yuan Chang, Chieh-Jen Chen, Eric Chen & Rain Wu, Fei-Hao Chen, I-Hsuen Chen, Tsun-Shing Cheng, Kai-Chun Chiang, Tiffany Chung, Tacita Dean, Manon de Boer, Ângela Ferreira, Peter Friedl, Valeska Gert, Kyungah Ham, James T. Hong, Chia-Wei Hsu, Li-Hui Huang, Po-Chih Huang, Yi-Chen Hung, Heung-Soon Im, Siren Eun Young Jung, Jun-Honn Kao, Yu-Ping Kuo, Latifa Laâbissi & I-Fang Lin & Christophe Wavelet, I-Chern Lai, Yi-Chih Lai, Thị Kim Bạch Lê, Xavier Le Roy, James Ming-Hsueh Lee, Hsu-Pin Lee, Pierre Leguillon, Kuei-Pi Li, Minouk Lim, River Lin, Yi-Wei Lin, Chih-Hung Liu, Vincent Meessen, Christine Meisner, Santu Mofokeng, Jean-Luc Moulène, Reinhard Mucha, Pages magazine, Chan-Kyong Park, Varlen Pen, Jo Ractliffe, Ella Raidel, Yvonne Rainer, Shubigi Rao, Ad Reinhardt, Walid Sadek, Alexander Schellow, Pen Sereypagna & The Vann Molyvann Project, Shake, Nida Sinnokrot, Penny Siopis, Yu-Hsien Su, Chaong-Wen Ting & Yannick Dauby, Lương Trần, Công Tùng Trương, Po-Hao Tseng & Lecture of Ghost, Hong-Kai Wang, Mo-Lin Wang & Blacklist Studio & Sow-Yee Au, Christophe Wavelet, Witkacy, Chi-Yu Wu & Sum-Sum Shen & Chihying Musquiqui, Paola Yacoub, Wei-Li Yeh & Shih-Chiang Yeh, among others.

The Taipei Biennial 2016 proposes to explore different practices of thought, the invention of discursive and performative apparatuses, and the production of models and images leading to heterogeneous narrations allowing trans-disciplinary artistic experiences bound to a "critical intimacy" between the artwork and the visitor. In doing so, it unravels relations to archiving or anti-archival gestures and modes of memorization, to their readings and usage, to their potential appropriations, taking in consideration historical and cultural paradigm shifts. Through acts of deciphering and activation, the biennial embraces the catalytic role of museums in navigating between knowledge systems.

The biennial’s configuration will encompass visual arts, dance, performance, cinema, and writing with historical evocations, editorial platforms, symposiums, and workshops to take place in the museum as well as in cultural venues, theaters and the universities of Taipei as a means to establish collaborations and stimulate a local synergy.

To reflect on societal frames and artistic experimentations, the biennial will adopt a speculative approach to some questions posed by anthropologist David Graeber in his book Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy: how to formulate a coherent critique of institutional bureaucracy and its structural violence in such a way that human imagination and radical thought do not lose their vital center; how to disarm configurations of power, including as proposed by artist Peter Friedl “the power of display,” and how the state of consciousness with which something is produced creates a liberated zone.

This allows a constellation of artistic proposals resonating with:
performing the archives,
performing the architecture,
performing the retrospective,
the collective body,
the conquest of space,
the labor of ruins,
the public sphere.

The exhibition will offer a space embracing debates and reconfiguring the logic of what is shared, of the common, a site for public staging where art is experienced as the production of narratives with a firm grip on historical conditions and realities that play along or resist, realities to come, or whose advent is impossible. It investigates how the museum invents various modi operandi to deal with the transmission of artistic heritage in the enlarged context of the history of modernity, the amplification of reception of ideas and gestures, in relation to constantly evolving acts and forms seeking emancipation.

The detailed program for the biennial will be announced soon.

Registration for professional and press viewing is now open. Please visit www.taipeibiennial.org for more.