Artist list: Marina Abramovic, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Allora and Calzadilla, Joan Jonas, Laura Lima, Bruce Nauman, Otobong Nkanga, Roman Ondák, Yoko Ono, Tino Sehgal, Xu Zhen (“In Just a Blink of an Eye”), Cao Fei (“Coming Soon”), Zhang Huan (“12m2”), Double Fly (“Milk of Pure Love”), Hu Xiangqian (“Two Men”)

“’15 Rooms’ will take place at Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai. In 2015, there will be 15 rooms for 15 artists to present live performances for small groups of people. This spectacular artistic project, already organized in various cities, will continue to take place in the coming years. Last year, there were 14 rooms, this year there will be 15 and next year 16. The overall temporary installation of the rooms is variable but the basic properties of each one are always the same: a floor area of 5 x 5 m, a height of 3.5 m, a door and no windows…The central structure wall of the Long Museum is encased with mirrors and optically vanishes into the overall installation, while two mirrored walls placed at the two narrow ends optically extend the white façades and the doors to infinity.” —Herzog & de Meuron

“15 Rooms”—the fifth edition of the exhibition on live-art curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist—will create a unfinished dialogue between traditional and live-art, Western and Asian cultural production, audience and artworks, imagining a continuous path from our recent past towards the future.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Klaus Biesenbach

“15 ROOMS”

Curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Hans Ulrich Obrist

Designed by Herzog & de Meuron

“15 Rooms” is a major live-art exhibition curated by Klaus Biesenbach— Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art—and Hans Ulrich Obrist—co-director of the Serpentine Gallery—the exhibition features performative works by artists spanning different generations and continents.

For the 2015 edition, one more work than the previous edition at Art Basel will be presented in the architectural environment conceived by Herzog & de Meuron.

For the 2015 edition, curators will invite 15 international and Chinese artists to activate a room each, exploring the relationship between space, time and physicality with an artwork which uses human beings as ‘material’. Giving visitors an insight into a more performative and interactive practice, visitors encounter a new situation inside each of the 15 rooms, engaging in a diverse series of immersive and intimate experiences.

By bringing to Shanghai this singular project, the Long Museum West Bund reflects on the blurring of the line between audience and artwork, while embracing the belief that visual artists can just as well create their artworks by working with human beings as by deploying bronze, canvas, inkjet, oil paints, video or any other method of physical production.

As the curators declared, the concept for the show developed from the idea that live art can also be sculpture and have a duration similar to that of a physical object; that is, last from morning to night, throughout the opening hours of the museum. But when the last visitors leave, when the gallery closes its doors for the evening, the sculptures will all walk out as well.

“15 Rooms” also reflects on how performative art can create the possibility of an exhibition that might be restaged later, of something that can be reproduced endlessly. Art can travel over time not just through objects and not just through documentation. Paintings have always been a lasting, valued art form. Instructional art creates a valid possibility for art to travel and last. “15 Rooms” is like this: from the basic text it can be restaged in different places all over the world and it can also take place again in 50 years’ time, or when we will all be dead in 100 years time.

Slowness it is not only important for the curatorial process but also for the experience of the “15 Rooms” exhibition. The experience of “15 Rooms” creates the opposite of the acceleration that characterise the way in which visitors pass through exhibition: it is a deceleration. Movement is slowed down by the fact that you have to open the door—it’s like entering into somebody house. It is an intimate encounter.

Herzog & de Meuron’s purpose built architecture plays a crucial role in shaping the exhibition, serving as the interstitial structure tying together a series of intimate experiences in the space of the Museum. The idea is not only focused on what happens in the exhibition, but also on what occurs around an exhibition. What interested the curators and the architects was the idea of opening up towards the outside, the creation of public spaces, and how it is possible to create such spaces.

The exhibition will be hosted in the ground floor of the Long Museum West Bund.

First presented as 11 Rooms in July 2011 as part of Manchester International Festival, the exhibition was originally commissioned by Manchester International Festival, the International Arts Festival RUHRTRIENNALE 2012-2014 and Manchester Art Gallery. The project was then shown as ‘12 Rooms’ at the International Arts Festival RUHRTRIENNALE 2012-2014, as ‘13 Rooms’ by Kaldor Public Art Projects at Pier 2/3 in Sydney’s Walsh Bay in April 2013, and as “14 Rooms” by Art Basel in June 2014. For each edition, the artists list partially changed.

[About the curators]

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Co-director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris. Since his first show “World Soup” (The Kitchen Show) in 1991 he has curated more than 250 shows.

Klaus Biesenbach is Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he has curated groundbreaking retrospectives like “Kraftwerk: Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8″ (2012) and “Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present” (2010) both at MoMA. Prior to this he co-founded the Kunst-Werke (KW) Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (1991) and the Berlin Biennale (1996).

[About Architectural Designer]

Herzog & de Meuron established in 1978, is now a partnership led by five senior partners – Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Christine Binswanger, Ascan Mergenthaler and Stefan Marbach. Herzog & de Meuron designed a wide range of projects from the small scale of a private home to the large scale of urban design. While many of their projects are highly recognized public facilities, such as their stadiums and museums, they have also completed several distinguished private projects including apartment buildings, offices and factories. The practice has been awarded numerous prizes including The Pritzker Architecture Prize (USA) in 2001.

Long Museum is a private museum founded by the Chinese collector-couple Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei. Currently, Long Museum consists of two large museums in Pudong, Shanghai as well as on the Xuhui Riverfront—the Long Museum Pudong and Long Museum West Bund. Long Museum is presently the private museum with the greatest scale and with the greatest collecting power domestically in China. It takes on the mission of promoting artistic development and cultural inheritance all the while being rooted domestically; at the same time, Long Museum pays great attention to the contrasting presentation and research of ancient and contemporary art and of Eastern and Western cultures. The museum seeks to showcase the plurality of the visual arts from a global perspective and comprehensively and systematically present the magnificent accomplishments of Chinese art and the fresh vitality of contemporary world art.