Today Taipei Fine Arts Museum announced the provisional list of artists who will participate in the 2008 Taipei Biennial.
Curated by Vasif Kortun and Manray Hsu and due to open on September 13, 2008, the exhibition will present a constellation of correlated themes in a gesture that addresses the chaotic states of things in this time of globalization.
The exhibition will engage with the city of Taipei in various ways and as well as in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, it will also utilize the urban spaces. One of the venues will be the Beer Brewery and while the factory’s history may represent a classical example of a post-industrialized city anywhere in the world, the exhibition is interested in seeking the nuances and specificities within the general. The brewery’s daily operation will go on during the exhibition period, and its space will be utilized as a real place rather than an insular exhibition zone. In addition, the curators plan to utilize a number of advertising boards in the city, spreading around, and coming into view when you least expect it.
The exhibition focuses on issues such as globalization and its resistances, the neoliberal habitat, mobility, borders, divided states and micro-nations/states, urban transformations, informal economies, and the war condition. However, each focus comes with many other questions, and to this end, the Biennial has been commissioning as many new works as possible and/or asking the artists to rethink and adapt previous projects for the Taipei context. There will be existing works juxtaposed against the new ones.
List of the Participating Artists in progress (as of March 28, 2008):
Lara Almarcegui (Netherlands); Yochai Avrahami (Israel); Matei Bejenaru (Romania); Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova (Romania); Democracia (Spain); Didier Fuiza Faustino (Portugal); Mieke Gerritzen (Netherlands); Shaun Gladwell (Australia); Nicoline van Harskamp (Netherlands); Oliver Ressler (Austria) & Zanny Beggs (Australia); Mario Rizzi (Italy); Katya Sander (Denmark); Saso Sedlacek (Slovenia); Superflex (Denmark); Bert Theis (Italy); Nasan Tur (Germany); Wong Hoy-cheong (Malaysia).