The Organizing Committee of the Shanghai Biennale has finally announced the selection of Anselm Franke as the chief curator of the 10th Shanghai Biennale, which is due to run from Nov 22, 2014 to March 31, 2015. It will take place at Shanghai’s mammoth Power Station of Art, with an area of over 40 000 sqm.
With only a little more than six months to prepare, Franke will have his work cut out for him—especially with what is likely to be a limited budget along with the ordinary difficulties of operating in Mainland China. Fortunately, with the Power Station of Art now running relatively smoothly for nearly two years, the 2014 Shanghai Biennale is likely at least to avoid the teething last-minute chaos which plagued the 2012 Biennale.
(See our interviews from the 2012 Biennale with the chief curator Qiu Zhijie and one of the co-curators Jens Hoffmann)
Full Press Release:
The Organizing Committee of the Shanghai Biennale is pleased to announce that after careful consideration of numerous candidates by the Shanghai Biennale Academic Committee, Mr. Anselm Franke has been selected to work as the chief curator for the 10th Shanghai Biennale.
Franke will work with a team of collaborators, soon to be announced. The 10th Shanghai Biennale will open on November 22, 2014 and conclude on March 31, 2015, concentrating its scope and take place in the Power Station of Art (PSA). As China’s longest running contemporary art biennale, the Shanghai Biennale is also the nation’s most important international visual art exhibition.
Curator and writer Anselm Franke is based in Berlin, where he works as Head of Visual Arts at the HKW / House of World Cultures. About the 10th Shanghai Biennial, he says: “Art, against all other forms of historical record, has the unique capacity to reflect the experience of people. This Biennial will engage with subjective experience and its relation to historical and collective processes. Through art, the production of subjectivity and of the social will be an object of playful and critical reflection. The Biennial will aim to contrast subjective experience with the logic of modernization, its rationalizations and standardizations, as well as the technological mediation of subjectivity. The 2014 Shanghai Biennial will bring artists working in China into relation with artists working in other parts of the world, which share the conviction that truth can only be evaluated from social experience.”
Anselm Franke is a curator and writer based in Berlin. He is Head of Visual Art and Film at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. In 2012, he curated the Taipei Biennial, Modern Monsters / Death and Life of Fiction. His project Animism was presented in Antwerp, Bern, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Shenzhen, Seoul and Beirut in various collaborations from 2010 to 2014. At the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, he co-curated The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside (with Diedrich Diederichsen), and After Year Zero. Geographies of Collaboration (both 2013).
