Mali Wu And Francesco Manacorda Named Co-curators Of The 2018 Taipei Biennial

On January 10, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) announced Mali Wu and Francesco Manacorda as the co-curators for the 2018 Taipei Biennial. Under the theme “Life-support, Living, Survival System,” Wu and Manacorda aim to bring environmental concerns to the forefront of the event’s 11th edition. The exhibition will drive home the concept of “eco-systemic interdependency,” reexamining humanity’s ever-changing relationship to nature.

Wu is a Taiwanese conceptual artist and associate professor at the National Kaohsiung Normal University, whose practice focuses on environmental issues and the effects of urbanization in Taiwan. Her projects such as “Awakening from Your Skin” that ran from 2000 to 2004, and “Art and Environment—A Cultural Action along the Tropic of Cancer” that was organized in 2006, advocated for communal engagement to mobilize the public and push for social change.

Francesco Manacorda, who stepped into his role as artistic director of Moscow’s V-A-C Foundation last September, has led multiple biennial projects in the past decade, including the Slovenian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 and the New Zealand Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale two years later. In 2016, he co-curated the Liverpool Biennial. Previously, he was the artistic director of Tate Liverpool. In 2009, at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, he curated the exhibition “Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009,” which will serve as a critical point of departure for the 11th Taipei Biennial.

Regarding the announcement, the director of TFAM, Ping Lin, said, “Much like the series of projects at Plum Tree Creek that Mali Wu has led in the past, we hope to build an interface and a mechanism for reflection, to achieve intercommunication between the arts and the natural environment, using our land as a specimen to produce examples of the interdependence between nature and the humanities [. . .] With Mr. Francesco Manacorda’s international connections and experience, both theoretical and practical, I am very excited to see how the Taipei Biennial can be a new kind of driving force for community-driven intercultural collaboration.”

The Taipei Biennial will take place from November 17, 2018, to March 10, 2019.

Julee WJ Chung is ArtAsiaPacific’s assistant editor.

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