Title and Concept Announced For 2020 Taipei Biennial
By Pamela Wong
Taipei Biennial 2020 curators BRUNO LATOUR (right) and MARTIN GUINARD (left) have revealed their concept for the upcoming edition. Copyright and courtesy Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
At a press conference at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) on September 17, Bruno Latour and Martin Guinard, curators of the 12th Taipei Biennial, revealed their concept for the forthcoming edition, titled “‘You and I don’t live on the same planet’ – New Diplomatic Encounters.”
The Biennial aims to reconcile the political and material conceptions of land, addressing both the fraught questions surrounding sovereignty and nationhood, as well as the physical conditions of Earth amid environmental crises. As the curators elaborated in their statement: “The expression ‘you and I don’t share the same vision of the world’ is a frequent figure of speech in political debates . . . But the point is that today it is not merely a difference of ‘visions’ about a space that would be the same for everyone, but a question of ‘the material nature’ of the very world that we are talking about.”
The curators plan to engage artists, activists, architects, and scientists to produce wide-ranging perspectives on the Biennial’s theme. Latour and Guinard noted that the upcoming festival will build on the ideas explored in the 2018 edition, “Post-Nature – A Museum as an Ecosystem,” which applied the ecological concept of interdependence to the art world.
On September 21, Latour will present a lecture titled “Towards the New Climatic Regime,” the first public event of the 2020 edition’s parallel program.
The 12th Taipei Biennial will take place at TFAM from October 24, 2020, to February 28, 2021.
Pamela Wong is ArtAsiaPacific’s assistant editor.
