10th Shanghai Biennale
November 23, 2014–March 31, 2015
Power Station of Art
200 Huayuangang Rd
Shanghai
China
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 9–17h
Curator: Anselm Franke
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 Biennale 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 Biennale 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 Biennale 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).
About the Power Station of Art (PSA):
The building of PSA is 128 meters long, 70 meters wide and 50 meters high, with the area of more than 40,000 square meters and 12 exhibition halls. The 165-meter-high chimney, made of reinforced concrete, is the symbol of modern industry and modern urban life based on thermal power generation during more than one century. Today, this chimney is a distinct landmark on the left bank of the Huangpu River, and its inside is the shape of Migdal Bavel, which is one part of the exhibition space in the museum.
Presenting contemporary art as one part of the systematic art history, PSA is the first state-run contemporary art museum in mainland China in this sense. As a public-welfare art institute, PSA opens to the public free of charge. Meanwhile, on the premise of collecting, studying and displaying contemporary art works, PSA provides a platform of practice and operation for young curators and new prominent artists, and offers a fashionable space and an amiable interface for the public to contact, appreciate and understand contemporary art.
The Organizing Committee of the Shanghai Biennale
May 2014
