Taipei Biennial 2023 Announces Dark ‘Small World’ Theme
The exhibition proposes alternatives to the 'shrinking pod made of cameras and screens feeding your eyeballs and draining your energy.'
Taipei Biennial 2023 curators Reem Shadid, Freya Chou, and Brian Kuan Wood.
Taipei Biennial has announced the theme of its 13th edition, which takes place from 18 November 2023 to 24 March 2024 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM).
Curators Freya Chou, Brian Kuan Wood and Reem Shadid chose the title Small World for the exhibition. The phrase implies a perversion of the global village envisioned by the 'it's a small world' Disney ride, which debuted in 1966. Half a century later, the Internet reveals the whole wide world to us while shrinking our offline lives to the distance between our retinas and our screens.
'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,' the curators said in a statement. '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,' they said.
A press release announcing the exhibition raised the stakes even further, saying, the exhibition is 'an appeal to draw out the deathlike fatigue of systems fuelled by chronic mistrust and reclaim a sense of clarity on skilfully buried conflicts and calamities that continue to seep into our organs, habits, and soils.'
Jun-Jieh Wang, Director of TFAM, said the forthcoming biennial 'brings a light touch to the issues we are facing in contemporary society, but at the same time profoundly questions how [people] situate themselves when temporal and spatial conditions are constantly re-defined.'
The exhibition builds on the last Taipei Biennial, You and I Don't Live on the Same Planet (21 November 2020–14 March 2021), curated by Bruno Latour, Martin Guinard, and Eva Lin. Writing for Ocula Magazine, Penny Liu said that exhibition considered 'difference as an entry point for understanding and rethinking processes of globalisation.'
Artists premiering new works at this year's biennial include Pio Abad, Nadim Abbas, Nesrine Khodr, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Lai Chih-Sheng, Li Yi-Fan, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Yang Chi-Chuan, and dj sniff. —[O]
