Department of Cultural Affairs

By Yali Chen
 
Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) has published a list of 39 participating artists and groups from 18 countries for the 12th edition of the Taipei Biennial. Owing to the coronavirus pandemic, TFAM has postponed the event, which will now run from November 21, 2020, until March 14, 2021.
 
Titled “You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet,” this year’s biennial aims to integrate political and diplomatic strategy into environmental debate. The event will be co-curated by French sociologist-philosopher Bruno Latour and Paris-based independent curator Martin Guinard-Terrin.


Photo from TFAM
“Mass” (2020) by French artists June Balthazard and Pierre Pauze.
 
In the hope of transforming the exhibition into a fieldwork, the two curators have invited Taiwan’s Mt. Project founder and director Eva Lin (林怡華) to join the team and take charge of this year’s public programs.
 
TFAM unveiled the curatorial theme in September 2019, at a time when Latour and Guinard-Terrin were doing fieldwork in Taipei. The curators also spoke to a number of Taiwanese scholars, including Daiwie Fu (傅大為), Wang Zhi-hong (王志弘), Sean Hsiang-lin Lei (雷祥麟), and Kuo Wen-hua (郭文華). Their conversations spanned political science, sociology, geology, marine science, and the humanities, and laid the groundwork for this year’s biennial.


Photo from TFAM
“Présage” (2017) by Moroccan artist Hicham Berrada.
 
French artists June Balthazard and Pierre Pauze, Moroccan artist Hicham Berrada, Mexican artist Antonio Vega Macotela, Brazilian artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrane, London-based duo Cooking Sections, and Paiwan artist Aruwai Kaumakan (武玉玲) will take part in the event.


Photo from TFAM
“Moment in Blossom” (2018) by Paiwan artist Aruwai Kaumakan.

The exhibition is being imagined as a “planetarium” where each artist has a certain “gravitational pull.” Aruwai Kaumakan’s “Moment in Blossom” (2018) embodies the features of what curator Latour has called the “Terrestrial Planet.”
 
A jewelry designer by profession, after a typhoon destroyed her hometown in 2008 Kaumakan decided to change her creative direction and now creates works that are a marvelous example of Paiwan culture and art.
 
One of the highlights of this year’s biennial is the “Theater of Negotiations” (協商劇場), a collaborative project by the teachers and students of the Taiwan Science, Technology and Society Association (臺灣科技與社會研究學會). It is a collaboration that seeks to express the need for dialogue to care for this planet that we all live on.