Anselm Franke to Curate the Shanghai Biennale

Berlin-based writer and curator Anselm Franke has been appointed chief curator of the tenth edition of the Shanghai Biennale, which opens this November. Franke, who is currently Head of Visual Art and Film at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, says that the Biennale will explore notions of subjectivity and creative process in an age of technological mediation.

From 2006 to 2010, Franke was artistic director of Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp, where he curated critically acclaimed exhibitions such as “Mimétisme” (2009) and “Animism” (2010), which explored the fields of animation and film. The latter subsequently travelled to Antwerp, Bern, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Shenzhen, Seoul and Beirut, in collaboration with various institutions.

In 2012, Franke curated the ninth Taipei Biennale, entitled “Monsters / Death and Life of Fiction,” taking the Chinese mythical monster Taowu as his point of departure. Alongside the main exhibition, which featured 47 artists and artistic collectives, the Biennale also included a series of six “Mini-Museums” that explored the need for collective visions addressing nationalist and identity politics in the shadow of colonialism and imperialism.

For the Shanghai Biennial, Franke hopes to foster relations between artists working in China and their international counterparts, all of whom he believes to share the conviction that “truth can only be evaluated from social experience.” The Biennale will open on November 22, 2014, and run through March 31, 2015, at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai.