Three Curators to Lead 13th Taipei Biennial

On November 2, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum named Freya Chou, Brian Kuan Wood, and Reem Shadid as the curatorial team to lead the upcoming 13th Taipei Biennial, slated to open in November 2023.

Each member of the curatorial trio has extensive experience in their respective areas. Chou, now based between Taiwan and Hong Kong, was the curator of the 2022 Hong Kong Pavilion, which featured Angela Su, at the 59th Venice Biennale, and was a member of the curatorial council for the 58th Carnegie International, which opened in September in Pittsburgh. She has previous experience working on the curatorial teams of the Taipei Biennial in 2008 and 2010, and also co-curated the Shanghai Biennale in 2014. While working at Hong Kong’s Para Site from 2015 to 2019, Chou was the inaugural education and public program curator.

Beirut-based curator Shadid is a co-curator for the upcoming New Vision 2023 Triennial at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Sandiva, Norway. This year, she also led the curator’s workshop at the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. She has been hosting a radio show on the online radio station Radio Alhara, which features “the intersection of sonic, visual and literary productions,” and she contributes her writings to the digital platform Infrasonica. Formerly the deputy director of Sharjah Art Foundation where she worked from 2006 until 2020, she was involved in the organization of many editions of the Sharjah Biennial.

A New York-based writer and editor, Wood was one of the founding editors of the highly influential e-flux journal. His essays and writings have been published in numerous collections such as What about Activism? (2019), Ageing Process (2016), and he is the editor of volumes including Selected Maria Lind Writing (2010). As the director of research at the School of Visual Arts in New York, he has taught in the master’s program of curatorial practice since 2015.

While the list of participants of the upcoming edition will be announced at a later date, the 2023 Taipei Biennial will explore: “How the pressures of daily life and survival flip the scales on many hyper-performative modern apparatuses, sending their weights and measures haywire, breaking open stubbornly intimate enclosures in a still-growing world.”

• Taiwan