The French art critic/curator Nicolas Bourriaud (b. 1965) has been selected as the curator of the Taipei Biennial 2014. Titled The Great Acceleration, it will develop his curatorial concept for the biennial around the topic Art and Its New Ecosystem: A Global Set of Relations.
Since 1998, the Taipei Biennial has launched its international programming in the city by inviting guest curators to contribute to an enriched environment, cross-cultural practices, and to showcase disciplines and new practices of art today. But the Taipei Biennial also endeavours to address social and historical issues concerning the city (Taipei) as a place, not merely a venue, by mixing artists and elements of the city.
In this light, Nicolas Bourriaud will expand on his theory of relational aesthetics, examining how contemporary art expresses this new contract among human beings, animals, plants, machines, products and objects. The exhibition will highlight the way artists focus on links, chainings, connections and mutations, and how they envision planet Earth as a huge network, where new states of matter and new forms of relations appear, forming a new state of the “ghost dance” between people and objects that Karl Marx has described in the 19th century.
The Taipei Biennial 2014 will be held at Taipei Fine Arts Museum from 13 September 2014 through 4 January 2015.
