Taipei Biennial announces curatorial concept for 2023

The curatorial concept has been announced for the 13th edition of Taipei Biennial, running from 18th November 2023 to 24th March 2024 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM).

Curated by independent curator Freya Chou, writer and editor Brian Kuan Wood, and curator Reem Shadid, this year’s Taipei Biennial is titled “Small World”.

In this iteration, a number of artists are selected to produce or premier new works including Pio Abad (London), Nadim Abbas (Hong Kong), Nesrine Khodr (Beirut), Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (Los Angeles), Lai Chi Sheng (Taipei), Li Yi Fan (Taipei), Jen Liu (New York), Natascha Sadr Haghighian (Berlin/Tehran), dj sniff  (Los Angeles/Tokyo), and Yang Chi Chuan (Taipei).

On this edition’s curatorial ethos, the three curators advise “no matter what hell you have been through these past few years, you have most likely felt and seen endings become beginnings and beginnings abruptly end. You may have run for cover in the nearest enclosure, only to find yourself in a shrinking pod made of cameras and screens feeding your eyeballs and draining your energy. Perhaps it’s time to look under the tangle of pipelines and ask how we might render the menacing drone of automation as music, how to explore the unknown power of the ground just underneath our feet, which might underwrite a possibility for a new and more lyrical kind of life and creation.”

The 13th edition of Taipei Biennial will transform the Taipei Fine Arts Museum into a space of listening, gathering, improvising and exploring other ways to perceive and navigate recent lessons learned about the life that we really want. It’s an appeal to draw out the deathlike fatigue of systems fuelled by chronic mistrust and reclaim a sense of clarity on skillfully buried conflicts and calamities that continue to seep into our organs, habits and soils.

Jun-Jieh Wang, Director of TFAM, believes that the 2023 Taipei Biennial is charting another path for the biennial and looks very much forward to its presentation. He adds “It brings a light touch to the issues we are facing in contemporary society, but at the same time profoundly questions how ones situate themselves when temporal and spatial conditions are constantly re-defined.”

Being one of the most long-standing biennials in Asia, the Taipei Biennial held by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum has endeavoured in driving Taiwanese contemporary art development since it was launched in 1998, facilitating a platform of interaction and exchange between local and international communities through its vigorous engagement informed by diversely cultural perspectives in Asian and global contemporary art networks.

The CTBC Foundation for Arts and Culture, continues to be the lead sponsor of the exhibition, following its support to the 2020 edition.