Andrés Jaque appointed Chief Curator of the 13th Shanghai Biennale

After careful consideration and with the broad support from the Academic Committee of the Power Station of Art, as well as receiving confirmation from the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism, Spanish curator, architect, and writer Andrés Jaque has been appointed the Chief Curator of the 13th Shanghai Biennale. The exhibition will be held at the Power Station of Art from November 13, 2020 to March 28, 2021.

Born in Spain in 1971, Andrés Jaque currently lives in New York and works as the Director of the Advanced Architectural Design Program at Columbia University. In 2013, Jaque founded the Office for Political Innovation, based in New York and Madrid, which operates at the intersection between architecture and art, focusing on the exploration of how different bodies, technologies, and environments converge to form interspecies alliances.

Expressing his vision for the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Jaque said: “It will be my priority that the city of Shanghai is not only a venue but also a fundamental actor in the discourse, content, and experience of the Shanghai Biennale. I very much look forward to working with agile artists to develop new productions in response to specific sites. New commissions will also be conceived with Shanghai-based groups, collectives, associations, or professionals, as a way to assemble different kinds of sensitivity and knowledge through art-making, and moreover, as a way to empower the legacy the Biennale leaves for the social tissues the city is constituted on.”

The PSA’s Academic Committee believes that Andrés Jaque excels at establishing connections between art and the public through his frequent interdisciplinary collaborations with artists, scientists, architects, historians, ecologists, and other like-minded individuals. Furthermore, his concept of spatial interventions and development of historical depth naturally connect the PSA with Shanghai’s civic infrastructure, allowing the Biennale to occupy the city and to stimulate the public’s imagination and discussions surrounding local experiences in Shanghai and human civilization as a whole.

The theme of the 13th Shanghai Biennale will be announced in January 2020. Recruitment for the Biennale’s City Projects will also be officially launched at that time.

About Andrés Jaque
Andrés Jaque is an architect, writer, and curator internationally renowned as one of the initiators of interscalar and transmedium approaches to urban and territorial studies. His work explores environments as the entanglement of life, bodies, technologies and environments. He holds a PhD from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. He has been the Heinrich Tessenow Stipendiat (Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S.) and Graham Foundation Grantee. He is the founder of the Office for Political Innovation, a New York/Madrid-based agency working at the intersection of research, critical environmental practices and design.

Andrés Jaque is the Director of Columbia University, Advanced Architectural Design Program—a legendary architectural innovation lab that has shaped the evolution of architecture in the last three decades. He has previously taught in Princeton University and UPM’s Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid. He has been awarded the Frederick Kiesler Prize, the most important distinction celebrating trajectories in the boundaries of art and spatial practices, the Silver Lion to the Best Project of the 14 Mostra Internazionale di Architettura della Biennale di Venezia, and the Dionisio Hernández Gil Prize to the intervention on historical enclaves. In 2018 he co-curated Manifesta 12 in Palermo, The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Coexistence, which inquired the ecological, technological and political role Palermo played as a site and actor of border violence and cross-pollination.

His work is part of the collection of MoMA in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others major museums around the world, and has been exhibited in international biennales, highlights including Venice, Sao Paulo and Gwanju; he has also developed projects with many of the most important cultural organizations around the world, including Victoria & Albert Museum, Het Nieuwe Instituut, MoMA PS1, Columbia University. His publications include: Superpowers of Scale (2019), Transmaterial Politics (2017), Transmaterial /Calculable (2017).