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Biennale to ‘debate, reason and tell stories’
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WITH US$17.8 billion worth of goods snapped up on Singles Day — Alibaba’s shopping festival, 40 carpets bought from the e-commerce giant attracted the eye of those who visited the Power Station of Art.
Titled “Alibaba and the 40 Thieves,” the jazzy carpets are a wall installation created by Belgian artist Heidi Voet, who is among the 92 artists from 40 countries, whose works are on view at the 11th Shanghai Biennale, which runs until March 12 next year.
Two years after its 10th edition, “Social Factory,” which prompted visitors to look beyond China’s economic progress, the latest Shanghai Biennale proposes, “Why Not Ask Again: Arguments, Counter-arguments and Stories” — a theme that alludes to Indian director Ritwik Ghatak’s 1974 film “Reason, Debate and a Story.”
With New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective as chief curator, and a curatorial collegiate with members from India, China, and Australia, the Biennale conveys an artistic vision that shifts from the East-West dichotomy to explore possibilities of South-South dialogue. Selected from a wide range of regions, the over 100 works on display vary dramatically in medium and scale — from a record disk with a diameter of 30 centimeters to a multilevel megastructure taking the shape of a barren moonscape.
The latter, titled “The Great Chain of Being — Planet Trilogy,” harbors in its heart vestiges and detritus of earth’s civilization — miscellaneous curios, flickering video footages, and even a swarm of bees — to be found as visitors enter the darkness through a crashed airplane. Connecting three historical points to tell a post-human story, the installation piece by MouSen+MSG is reminiscent of Liu Cixin’s celebrated sci-fi series “The Three-Body Trilogy,” which is another starting point in the conception of this year’s Shanghai Biennale.
“Science fiction is one of the bridges between the East and the West in terms of contemporary literature,” explains Tess Maunder, the Australian part of the Biennale’s curatorial collegiate. “It projects what the future could be, but also comments on the history and the present through doing that.”
Some of the less futuristic stories told at the Biennale, however, exude a more poignant sense of historicity and urgency. In still and moving images, performance artist Regina José Galindo uses her body to make a silent outcry about the histories of violence and exclusion in Guatemala.
A television set on the same floor shows Kurdish artist Sener Özmen contemplating a white dove, while his son talks to the clueless dove about peace, outside of the camera frame.
“Stories are how we grow up and learn about how we relate to the world,” says Maunder. “Arguments and counter-arguments may help to change our positions or ideas about things around us.”
By weaving together archive and science fiction, history and geography, the Shanghai Biennale seeks not to elicit a single truth, but to question what will happen when different worlds collide.
As an avenue of making important inquiries, the works at the exhibition are connected not only thematically but also spatially.
Looked at from above on a staircase, Ivana Franke’s Disorientation Station, a meditation room, and Marjolijn Dijkman’s Lunar Station, a colossal sand pendulum, are two perfect circles that echo each other — an example of the recurrent shapes used by the curatorial team to structure the exhibition.
“The collaboration with architects Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty was fundamental to how we approached the exhibition and the notion of materiality,” Maunder says.
Beyond the power plant-turned-museum, the Shanghai Biennale branches out into the depths of the megalopolis with its “51 Personae” project, which selected 51 local personalities through an open call, to represent the myriad ways of inhabiting the city. Among them are urban chroniclers, candy enthusiasts, acrobats and garage impresarios. All of them come with their own city stories to share at different locales in Shanghai.
With local and regional voices resonating with each other both in and outside the exhibition space, the Shanghai Biennale puts forward sincere questions, amidst assumptions, assertions and conflicts in a world that is fraught with uncertainty.
Lingering in discussions around the limit of reality and fiction, history and future, concept and sensation, it provides the audience with a common ground that is imagination, inviting visitors to ask, ask, and then ask again.
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