Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War

On the afternoon of Thursday, April 18, at the Palazzo delle Prigioni, Public Forum: “Thinking Like an Island” linked to the Taiwan Collateral Event Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War, organized by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan, presents public programs focusing on "island-thinking" during the opening week of the 60th International Venice Biennale.

"Public Forum: Thinking Like an Island" will highlight island-thinking as a methodology for survival and touching on what it is to be an island in a time of the reality of rising tides. Artist Yuan Goang-Ming, curator Abby Chen, and three curators from the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), Tate Modern (UK), and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum will engage in an in-depth discussion on the exhibition. Afterwards, "Live Performance: Go Tell It To the Mountain" will feature Iraqi artist Ali Yass and Palestinian artist and curator Joud Al-Tamimi (both based in Berlin), presenting a communion with past-present yearnings and unfinished political projects.

Within the exhibition space of the Taiwan Collateral Event, there will be a continuous interplay of sirens, explosions, sudden impacts, and a slow-paced recording of the national anthem. These sounds, originating from different artworks, permeate through scenes capturing air defense drills, civil disobedience movements, as well as household scenarios. The exhibition title, Everyday War, aims to explore the living conditions of individuals with unpredictable threats of social transformation and unstable situations. From the perspective of the Taiwanese artist Yuan Goang-Ming, the exhibited works highlight how the places in which we dwell daily are gradually deteriorating as a result of unequal distribution of capitalism, cyber-attacks, climate change, ethnic conflicts, and other conflicts.

"The Warfare Within the Everyday" and the "The Everyday Within Warfare" have not only become universal contexts in contemporary art but also, as emphasized by curator Abby Chen, a powerful response to the curatorial theme proposed by Adriano Pedrosa, the chief curator of the 2024 Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere. Yuan's creations depict skepticism and unease towards this seemingly ideal world and metaphorically reflect the difficulties humans face in a chaotic life, as if suggesting that “the ideal place must be elsewhere, not here".

Public Forum: “Thinking Like An Island”
Time: Thursday, April 18, 2024, 4–5pm 
Address: Palazza delle Prigioni, Venice, Italy

Forum speakers
Yuan Goang-Ming, exhibiting artist
Abby Chen, exhibition curator 
Naz Cuguoğlu, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art & Programs, Asian Art Museum
Hera Chan, Adjunct Curator, Asia-Pacific, Tate Modern
Birde Tang, Curator, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum

Live performance: “Go Tell It To The Mountain”
Ali Yass, artist
Joud Al-Tamimi, artist, curator