想像 Death 的 and Life of 死而復生 Fiction Modern Monsters / Death and Life of Fiction Taipei Biennial 2012 Exhibition Maps 8 Foreword 17 Wei-Gong Liou Preface 19 Hai-Ming Huang Introduction 21 Anselm Franke

01 Hannah Hurtzig 26 02 Anton Vidokle 30 Hu Fang 03 Pak Sheung Chuen 32 04 Willem Oorebeek 34 05 Yu-Cheng Chou 36 06 Simon Fujiwara 38 07 Yervant Gianikian 40 Angela Ricci Lucchi 08 Maryam Jafri 42 09 John Akomfrah 44 10 Rajkamal Kahlon 46 Taipei Fine Arts Museum｜181, Zhong Shan N. Road, Sec. 3, Taipei Other venue: The Paper Mill｜31, Fude Road, Shihlin Dist., Taipei 11 Joven Mansit 48 12 harun Farocki 50 30 Wei-Li Yeh 92 13 Kao Chung-Li 52 31 peter Friedl 94 14 fernando Bryce 54 32 roee Rosen 96 15 Liu Ding 56 33 Jimmie Durham 98 16 Joachim Koester 58 34 andrea Geyer 100 17 Jompet Kuswidananto 60 35 the Otolith Group 102 18 the Museum 62 36 omer Fast 104 of the Monster 37 Luis Jacob 106 that Is History 38 the Museum of Rhythm 108 19 elisa Strinna 68 39 Marysia Lewandowska 112 20 adam Avikainen 70 neil Cummings 21 angela Melitopoulos 72 40 eric Baudelaire 114 Maurizio Lazzarato 41 chia-En Jao 116 22 andreas Siekmann 74 42 Boris Ondreička 118 23 rosemarie Trockel 76 43 Virlani Hallberg 120 24 ashish Avikunthak 78 44 the Museum of Gourd 122 25 the Museum 80 45 Jason Dodge 126 of Crossings 46 sun Xun 128 26 danh Vo 84 47 chang Chao-Tang 130 27 hsu Chia-Wei 86 48 teng Chao-Ming 132 28 Yin-Ju Chen 88 49 the Museum of 134 29 pratchaya Phinthong 90 Ante-Memorials 50 chen Chieh-Jen 138 51 the Museum of 140 the Infrastructural Unconsciousness 52 Wei-Li Yeh 144 53 Jakrawal Nilthamrong 146 54 Maria Thereza Alves 148 2 Years Project 150 Programme 152 Acknowledgments 154 8 First Floor

01 Hannah Hurtzig 02 Anton Vidokle, Hu Fang

03 Pak Sheung Chuen 13 10 18 15 9 04 Willem Oorebeek 8 20 18 05 Yu-Cheng Chou 17 16 14 12 11 19 06 7 Simon Fujiwara 21 4 5 07 Yervant Gianikian Angela Ricci Lucchi 21 6 7 8 3 08 Maryam Jafri 09 John Akomfrah

10 Rajkamal Kahlon 22 3 3 11 Joven Mansit 12 Harun Farocki 13 Kao Chung-Li 3 14 Fernando Bryce 2 15 Liu Ding 16 Joachim Koester 17 Jompet Kuswidananto 1 18 The Museum of the Monster That Is History 19 Elisa Strinna 20 Adam Avikainen 21 Angela Melitopoulos Maurizio Lazzarato 22 Andreas Siekmann 10 Second Floor

23 Rosemarie Trockel 24 Ashish Avikunthak 25 The Museum of Crossings 26 Danh Vo 27 Hsu Chia-Wei 28 Yin-Ju Chen 13 29 Pratchaya Phinthong 30 Wei-Li Yeh 30 27 31 Peter Friedl 32 Roee Rosen 26 33 25 29 31 32 Jimmie Durham 25 28 10 34 Andrea Geyer 25 33 35 The Otolith Group

24 34

35 23 12 Third Floor

36 Omer Fast 37 Luis Jacob 38 The Museum of Rhythm 45 39 Marysia Lewandowska 40 Neil Cummings 32 40 35 44 42 39 Eric Baudelaire 41 41 Chia-En Jao 42 Boris Ondreička 46 43 43 Virlani Hallberg 38 47 44 The Museum of Gourd 36 45 Jason Dodge 46 Sun Xun 28 49 37 38 38 47 Chang Chao-Tang 23 48 Teng Chao-Ming 38 49 The Museum of Ante-Memorials 48 14 Paper Mill

50 Chen Chieh-Jen 51 The Museum of the Infrastructural 53 Unconsciousness 52 Wei-Li Yeh 53 Jakrawal Nilthamrong 52

Off-site 52 54 Maria Thereza Alves

52 51

51

50 17 Foreword

The Taipei Biennial is a major event community the finest creative of international cultural exchange prototypes and references at the held biannually and supported by the moment, stimulating development Taipei city government. Maturing and across all sides of the cultural expanding since its inaugural edition realm. This edition of the Taipei in 1998, the Biennial has become Biennial, the eighth, opens on a vital cultural dynamo and asset for Education Day in Taiwan, indirectly Taipei, if not all of Taiwan. At home signifying the essence of the 2012 and around the world, the exhibition Biennial—that a biennial exhibition has taken on special significance, woven from numerous stories, and we look forward to each edition documents, writings, videos and every two years with great anticipa- other media requires the audience’s tion and interest. active participation and feedback. Numerous new works featured I would like to express my at the Biennial in recent years have sincerest appreciation to our cura- been produced on site in Taiwan, torial team, led by guest curator many of which reverberate with the Anselm Franke, and the contribu- socioeconomic zeitgeist both inter- tions and efforts of the more than nationally and locally—marking the 80 participating artists. Further exhibition with the traits of interna- gratitude also goes out to all the tionalization, localization, and close- institutions and partners that have ness to social reality. The biannual supported the Biennial over the event not only provides the local years. We are especially apprecia- community insight into signature tive of the ongoing support of the development in contemporary art, cabinet-level Ministry of Culture but also offers audiences a multifac- (formerly the Council for Cultural eted viewing experience, while Affairs) as well as the continued further acting as a vital platform of policy support and trust of succes- cultural dialogue between Taiwan sive city government administra- and the international community. The tions, without which we could expansion of this platform over the not keep the biennials going. This years will serve as a reference base abiding policy support in particular for future key historical accounts. indicates a cultural approach to Over its nearly 20-year history, national administration and a global the exhibition has not only endured perspective. Finally, best wishes for as Taiwan’s flagship contemporary another successful Taipei Biennial. art forum, but has had a huge impact on the creation and development of Wei-Gong Liou Taiwanese contemporary art. Each Commissioner edition of the Taipei Biennial gives Taipei City Department creative people across the cultural of Cultural Affairs 19 Preface

The planning and presentation of The Taipei Biennial 2012 is the Taipei Biennial 2012 coincides curated by Anselm Franke, who with a time of tumultuous change enlisted the participation of more in our world, as an unprecedented than 40 artists and collectives. onslaught of natural and man- Somewhat another 40 artists are made disasters hit with great force. featured in the “mini museums” Drastic swings in weather due to Franke proposed, around one-third climate change, rapidly melting of whom conceived new commis- poles, European debt and global sions for the exhibition. The largest economic crises, and skyrocketing edition to date, the exhibition spans unemployment are accompanied the Taipei Fine Art Museum’s first by earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons three floors, extending down to and flooding, while those areas not The Paper Mill in nearby Shilin. inundated with water can ignite into This biennial seeks to reflect vari- wildfires under the blazing sun. ous issues and processes over The earth and the people that inhab- the course of modern history from it her today, to borrow a Chinese Asian perspectives, exploring our phrase, are besieged under deep truly global historical experiences water and scorching fire. with the open-mindedness of And yet, like cats with nine contemporary art, and investigat- lives, biennial exhibitions are going ing questions as true universal strong all around the globe. Not historical experience. only have they seemingly remained All major exhibitions and strong in quantity, a number of events are the product of collective second-tier cities are even eagerly energy and wisdom. Taipei Biennial preparing biennials of their own. is shaped by the action and will of And so it seems that the biennial many people from all backgrounds continues to act as an important and positions, without whom it “voice” raising a city’s profile, and could never take place. With this in participants in various capacities mind, I would like to firstly thank all imagine and anticipate biennials of the artists for their great efforts in myriad ways. As the worldwide and contributions. Special grati- biennial phenomenon and its tude goes to all the institutions and contexts exert a strong impact on organizations that supported the the development of contemporary exhibition, including the Institute art, what can a biennial contribute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) amidst the deep waters and and Mondriaan Fonds in Amster- scorching fires around the world? dam, the International Artists Recent editions of the Taipei Bien- Studio Program in Stockholm, the nial have endeavored to respond Goethe-Institut Taipei, and the Brit- to this question. ish Council Taiwan. Additional 20 21 thanks are due to the Taipei city an additional dimension. Such an DEATH AND LIFE government and Ministry of Culture investment demands feedback and for the ongoing support that effort from viewers to truly bring out OF FICTION OR THE enables the Taipei Biennial to claim its effectiveness. a unique position in the Asian and MODERN TAOWU global contemporary art realms. Hai-Ming Huang In closing, I would like to thank Director The ancient Chinese monster Taowu beyond the realm of litera- Anselm Franke for his multi-layered Taipei Fine Arts Museum Taowu has been described ture and historiography and curation, complex in process and as a vicious creature that is always also tests the proposition beyond significance. We hope that the making the best of its own life, the limits of the Chinese experi- exhibition will provide local viewers due to its ability to see both future ence. It explores whether Taowu and artists a unique exhibition and past. In his book The Monster is a possible common experience in-the-moment experience. If we That is History, David Der-Wei of all modernity, and it uses the can note another record of sorts, Wang describes how somewhere monster as a figure through which Anselm Franke displayed intense in the course of Chinese history, we encounter contemporary interest in local culture while work- writers and historians began artists’ engagement with modern ing on the exhibition, and the to identify the monster Taowu with history. The modern Taowu we huge amount of time and energy history itself, since it could thwart imagine here sits not merely on the he invested gives the Biennial and undermine human intentions. prescribed road of history, but Taowu thus represented the also at the meridian point of dialec- human failure to master history tics—the point where opposites and occupied the blind spot of meet, originate, conflate. Like all the respective historical rationales. monsters, it is a dialectical figure, But Wang suggests that in fact a symptomatic mirror of actual modern Chinese history lends itself relations. Just as it guarded the to a reading through the Taowu. empire’s frontiers or imperial tombs The Chinese experience of the in ancient times, it now inhabits twentieth century, then, can be the borders of political and social characterized as a raging Taowu— control, the horizons of aspiration, an experience not merely of hitherto the lines of division, and the unheard of evils and suffering, distinctions that structure social but an experience of undermined life and the order of knowledge. human intentions, seeding not Situated in the middle between reason and liberation, but waves dividing lines, the Taowu is a of repression and countless constant reminder that both sides inhuman and irrational terrors of a division mutually constitute committed in the name of humanity, each other—that all relations, even rationality, or a social order the most asymmetrical, stem from that must be installed or defended such a meridian point of reciprocity. against all threats. The Taipei Its monstrosity is the very form Biennial 2012 takes Wang’s through which it reminds us of what suggestion as its starting point. we have in common with what At the same time, it takes the we exclude. 22 23 If there was a particular experi- monstrous fiction itself. When to enhance the awareness of the experienced in states of depression: ence of modernity represented killed in the name of facts, fiction fact that it is we ourselves who the absence of dialogue, the by the modern Taowu, it is the grows bigger; it is usually the first produce and reproduce the very absence of transformative power, experience of structural violence attacker who falls prey to the divisions from which the monster the absence of alterity. It is through and the double binds that tie new monstrosity thus created, the is born, so that we can stop this reflection on fiction that we victims to perpetrators, slaves power of which stems from the falling prey to the Taowu at the become aware of limits and bound- to masters, the minor to the major. fact that it no longer knows that border, which is the mechanism aries and our systemic implication The Taowu also represents the it is fictional. of monster-making: imposing in them: they are not “out there,” experience of being entrapped Yet what we call fiction is not our own evil as an objectified symp- but within our social bodies, within by an anonymous, faceless system merely manifest in those imaginary tom onto others. our cognitive and aesthetic appre- and the experience of terror- creations of monsters. It is in The death and life of fiction hension of the world, like dialogic as-rationality, as in disciplinary the stories we tell and the images appears in this exhibition, just like membranes. Fiction in this sense or “educational” violence (this we use to interact and make the Taowu, in ever-changing identi- tells us how our borders are guard- will teach them a lesson...). sense of our environments, of which ties. Sometimes it appears in the ed and how they can be opened But above all, the Taowu stands only a very small part are “fictional” experience of colonial and political or even dissolved; and the Taipei for the monstrous modern story in the conventional sense—that terror, as plain death that lurks Biennial suggests that we use both of power, whose vicious character, is, false or made up. Rather, fiction— behind powerful fictional projec- the aesthetics of monstrosity and intelligences, and stupidities or the imaginary—nests at the tions. Fictions die in the resulting the economy of fiction as essential the monster epitomizes; for it is center of a reality. It is through destruction of cultures, but they for a realism whose subject is the the dynamics (and so-called prag- fiction-as-figuration that cognition live on as fragments animating making and un-making of cultural matics) of power—the mastery and recognition becomes possible. the broken links—they live on as boundaries. over people as well as nature— Fiction determines what we can ghosts, or in the imagery of trauma, The question of modernity that have notoriously thwarted think and do in the world, and or in rituals of commemoration. today is not primarily a cultural the modern schemes of progress, above all, our horizon of possibility. The life of fiction is hence not identi- question. It is primarily systemic, emancipation, and liberation. Fiction is the glue that holds things cal with striving illusions, and machinic, and abstract, and its This biennial dedicates itself together, the womb from which the death of fiction not identical anonymous power overrides expe- to the death and life of fiction. images and the imaginary are born, with the final arrival at a definite rience, values, morals, culture, Modernity has unleashed fiction and the medium of which our reality or truth. But the death and subjectivities. The systemic on a grand scale—as colonial relationships are made. There of fiction indeed can also mark aspect of modernity is willfully projection, commodity driven is hence nothing outside fiction, a realization, or the end of a narra- ignorant of culture and human rela- economy, and desire. It has ghet- no other or beyond; there are tive, an image, or an ideology, tions, and this is its strength and toized fiction in institutions and only different qualities, different and the life of fiction can also mean its anonymous monstrosity. It is disciplines (such as “art”), but out grammars. We call these differ- fiction as a mask which diverts technological, but in a wider sense: there in the really-real world it ences in qualities culture. When us from actual relations and reali- it embraces the kinds of fixations, has waged a holy war on fiction, cultures die, this glue no longer ties. The life of fiction can refer inscriptions, calculations, and a holy war on beliefs, superstitions, holds the real world and the real to dreams and utopian projections automatizations that stabilize and and whatever is suspected of relationships together. In a similar or to ways of mediating alterity, make events predictable—only non-compatibility with rationality way, this exhibition attempts to but it can also be a life in fiction, in order to create a greater potential and the reality principle, in the import monsters from the limits in the sense of delusion, madness, for other entities to be displaced, attempt to replace these things or frontiers back into the center, and delirium. The death of fiction, mobilized, and to circulate. Under once and for all with modernity’s back “home,” into the core of on the other hand, can simply the conditions of modernity culture knowledge, its hard facts. Histori- normality and to normalize them, refer to the end of a dream, or less is, on the one hand, only the cally, this effort has been a powerful, bring them close to us—in order simply, to an immobilization as unpredictable outcome of the logic 24 25 of division and hence its destruc- needs are shared, horizons which of all forces of negation and negativ- tion; on the other hand, it is the unite people around a cause. ity at all costs: its lesson is the outcome of the forces unleashed We live in a historical moment (systemic) administration and by the dialectics of objectifying where all prevalent understandings management of the given—which control and hybrid entanglements. of the world within the frame of at least is better than yet another This systemic modernity does “modernity” are in crisis. The crisis wave of cultural destruction. not differentiate between humans concerns narratives, rationales, But the price that is paid for this or commodities or things when it ideologies. These things no longer is the loss of common horizons, feeds its machines at the frontiers provide us with common horizons and hence the loss of a sense of “development.” To be on the that mobilize us, since any such of alternatives, and of our basic side of the affixed or the mobilized aspiration is overshadowed by the autonomy, our productive powers is left to human concern. fear of unleashing the negative of negation. Thus we have ever In various ongoing waves of force of the modern Taowu, or is fewer narratives through which external and internal colonizations, already subverted by it in the form we imagine and negotiate our the frontiers of this systemic, of capitalism’s spectacular mimicry. relations as qualitative, and fewer abstract modernity have long The spirit of modernity was powerful images capable of altering the become global. Official ideologies and contagious: in its various present through an encounter with increasingly act like farcical Taowu incarnations it mobilized people and historical experience. This narra- in that they conflate and subvert changed both societies and the tive-imaginary vacuum calls for opposing positions along the world irreversibly. This was a spirit a dialogue with the monster that systemic necessities of power, of break-up and departure, a is modernity, in the form of a as shown by both the current spirit of aspiration against the back- re-narration which re-describes financial crisis or the regime in drop of the oppressive forces the modern divisions-as-relations, the PRC. This globalization also that first destroyed the memory hence implicating us in the histori- means that there is no more outside of the otherwise. But this spirit cal-narrative space we inhabit (spatial, cultural, critical) to the of common emancipatory aspiration but no longer know how to navigate. matrix of this systemic modernity, has died in a seemingly endless And this requires a radical historiciz- which embraces what it negates series of disappointments and ing of all ideas to meet the chal- in the contemporary deadlock of monstrous revelations, which today lenge of relativism, and the making- the inclusive exclusion. This cast their spectral shadow over strange of the systemic-normality means that there is no simple the horizons of the present, and fuel of modernity and its self-descriptions resistance nor simple negation systemic conformism, self-adapta- and narratives. The task is to close possible, since these positions are tion and self-modulation. The the gap between the cultural and already prescribed systemically. modern Taowu hence stands before the systemic aspect of modernity, But the fact that the modern Taowu us triumphant, petrifying us; it to unlearn to speak in the name produces and embraces its opposi- qualifies as perhaps the only univer- of the system and lend it our human tion and hence distributes its salist fiction of modernity that face. As a symptomatic mirror, subject positions does not mean has not died. It has become the the modern Taowu is a figure just that it is immune to the dialectics emblem of a modernity we can for that purpose, the purpose of power: it is forced to transform neither fully identify with nor leave of de-monstering. as the form of resistance changes. behind. The lesson of the modern But this resistance always depends Taowu as we contemplate it today Anselm Franke on culture as its resource: what it seems to dictate the reduction 26 � 1 27 war. Dumbfounded by this scene with the notion of knowledge and Hannah Hurtzig of decapitation, and in particular non-knowledge and how they are The Waiting Hall. Scenes Is this an epoch, a condition, a by the apparent passivity of the used and transferred in the act of Modernity, 2012 mental state, an idea, a method or Chinese onlookers enjoying the of communication in public space. a technique? There is a modernity spectacle, Lu Xun realized that Hannah Hurtzig’s Mobile Acad- The Waiting Hall. Scenes of of science, of art, of modern nation before saving Chinese people’s emy projects explore the rhetorics Modernity is a discursive event states, a technological modernity, bodies, he first had to save their and gestures of conversation, taking place on the opening a social modernity, a colonial souls. He abandoned his medical of one-to-one dialogues,­­­ and new night of the Taipei Biennial 2012 moder­nity, a capitalist modernity, studies and pursued literature. and old modes of assemblies. in the vast entrance lobby of the modernities of the colonized, His short stories, poems, and Each project is first a live event the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and the hyper-modernities of essays are taken to mark the and later becomes an installation where subsequently it will remain the contemporary capitalist cities beginning of modern Chinese and an archive. In addi­tion, each as an installation and archive. and worlds. And yet, if there are literature. Whether this event project is dedicated to a specific About seventeen people—artists, multiple modernities, what do actually took place or is a myth theme/subject and explores it in theorists, activists—are invited they have in common? There are retrospectively created by Lu an encyclopedic manner. to engage in dialogues, which take modern mythologies, among them Xun, “the case of the decapitation place in secluded, small office- the myth of the one modernity suggests that fiction and (private Hannah Hurtzig, born in boxes installed in the lobby. Five with only one trajectory of “develop- and public) history might have GDR, lives and works in Berlin dialogues take place in parallel, and ment,” one model of progress, the become inextricably confused, audience members listen to their myth of the anti-traditionalist ulti- at the (textual) beginning of modern The speakers dialogue of choice on headphones, mate break with an archaic, non- Chinese (literary) history.” (David Iran: Mozaffar-al-Din Shah’s but they can also register them- modern or corrupted past—a once Der-Wei Wang) Automobile selves to become a partner in one powerful picture in the imaginary of What qualifies as a “primal Bavand Behpoor is an art theorist, of the dialogues. The installation modernity that in the present has scene”? All scenes of modern artist and critic based in Tehran and is conceived as a backstage area been deeply destabilized and has origins appear to be scenes of Munich. Part of his work on Iran‘s and a waiting hall in the image of become uncertain, as no present “division”—whether this is the Martyr Museums is presented in the Taipei Biennial. a Kafkaesque narration of bureauc­ is safe from the “returns” of the past. cut­­ting off of a head from a body racy, inspection, and the pact In all cases, the question of or an ultimate break from a tradition Channel 4, The People between the one who waits and the just what constitutes “the modern” or a past. A “scene” or “scenog- Cheng Lu-Lin is a sociologist (economic one who keeps someone waiting. in modernity remains undecided raphy” also entails a relational sociology, developmental and organi­ Scenes of Modernity creates a and perhaps undecidable. But diagram—a constellation between za­tional sociology), and Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of space for undecided modernities there is no scarcity, on the other conscious actors, passive onlook- Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taipei. and their multiple “primal scenes.” hand, of “primal scenes” and ers, and anonymous structural Each conversation will last thirty myths of origin. The installation or systemic agency creating a “Yao-yan” Films minutes and revolve around takes as its point of departure a complex moment in time, staging Chen Chieh-Jen is a Taiwanese artist whose renowned videos and films are an image or description of this primal scene of modern Chinese the paradox of modernity. All defi­ the outcome of collaborative processes, chosen scene. litera­ture: in 1906, Lu Xun, then a nitions of “modernity” have such and address the aftermath of violence What is modernity? One of the student of Western medicine in “primal scenes,” events of rupture and imperialisms in the present. characteristics of this notorious term Japan, saw a slide show in which and myths of origin against which is that among different people and a Chinese crowd idly watched as the very definition of just what Wushe Incident and Mona Rudo Chiu Row-Long is an illustrator (Manhua different disciplines, there is strik- one of their compatriots was counts as “modern” is measured. Bale) and is particularly inspired by the ingly little agreement about its mean- beheaded for spying on the Japa- The installation work of Hannah history and culture of the Taiwanese ing and definition, dates and origins. nese army in the Russo-Japanese Hurtzig / Mobile Academy deals aborigines. He lives in Taipei. 28 � 1 29

Introduction to a Disappearing Territorial Agency, specialized in Language: Kari Seediq Tgdaya researching the relation between space Dakis Pawan (Guo Mingzheng in Chinese) and politics. is a language teacher from the tribe of the Seediq Tgdaya, in Jîn-ài-hiong in Nantou. A Desire to Become a Forefather Respected by Generations The Tilting Image to Come, as my Forefathers Anselm Franke is a writer and curator Have Been based in Berlin, and curator of the Panai Kusui is a singer, song writer, Taipei Biennial 2012. He is particularly and folk icon, collecting and preserving interested in liminal aspects of culture, aboriginal song tradition. She lives and the politics of mimesis. in Taitung.

John Akomfrah is a director based in The Living Room Is The Factory London whose films dedicated to the Teng Chao-Ming is a visual artist based experience of colonialism, diaspora, in New York and Taipei. His current and resistance. research is devoted to recent devel­ opments in neuroscience and our The Power of Party and Alcohol: understanding of the self. Independent Music and its Opponents Metamorphosis of Funeral Service Ho Tung-Hung is researching and in Taiwan writing in the fields of popular music, Tseng Haunn-Tarng, Professor at the youth culture, cultural politics, and Institute of Life and Death Education and action research, Taipei. Guidance at the National Taipei Univer­ sity of Nursing and Health Sciences. Consequences of the Urban Renewal Act of 1998 The Voice of Anti-Nuclear Huang Hui-Yu is an art student, activist, in Kungliao and a member of the Taiwan Association Tsui Shu-hsin is an anti-nuclear for Justice of Urban Renewal, Taipei. activist and the General Secretary of Green Citizens Action Alliance A Hole on the Wall: in Taiwan. She lives in Taipei. Why Paint Monochromes? Luis Jacob, is working as artist, curator, Modern Midwives and writer based in Toronto. His diverse for Cyborg Babies practice addresses issues of social Wu Chia-Ling researches in Medical interaction and the subjectivity of Sociology; Gender Studies; Technology aesthetic experience. and Society and is an Associate Professor at the Department of The First Picture of the Emperor Sociology, National Taiwan University. Meiji, 1888 Chihiro Minato is an artist, writer, critic and professor for Fine Art at Tama Art A Co-production by Taipei Biennial University, where he is one of the founding 2012 “Modern Monsters / Death and members of the Art Anthropology Life of Fiction”, Taipei Fine Art Museum Institute, established in 2006. and Mobile Academy Berlin

The Architecture of the International John Palmesino is an architect and Hannah Hurtzig, The Waiting Hall. Scenes of Modernity, 2012, installation urbanist based in London. Together and performance. Sketch: Florian Stirnemann; Courtesy of Hannah with Ann-Sofi Rönnskog he initiated Hurtzig / Mobile Academy Berlin 30 � 2 31 Anton Vidokle Hu Fang Two Suns, 2012 of the world, since the world must first be mirrored in our senses to This new film, a collaboration appear. Hence, the film’s image between artist Anton Vidokle and and sound construct a dialectic writer Hu Fang, is set in an aban­- relation between “portrait” and ­doned concrete house in the “mirror-building,” “landscape” and Taiwanese countryside, situated “person/self,” at times schizo- between a forest and a highway. phrenic, at other times exchanging We watch the building slowly being figure and ground, passive and clad by mirrors. In the process, active, ultimately dissolving into the house gradually vanishes from each other along this divide. sight, as it becomes a mirror, or The English subtitles of the rather, an image, of the surrounding work, finally, form a third, overarch- environment. The film presents ing narrative told in the first person us with an alle­gorical picture that by Anton Vidokle. This narrative lends itself to multiple readings, inscribes the work into the context yet is directed at a vanishing point. of architectural modernism by telling This point reveals itself in moments the story of Vidokle’s visit to the of disappearance, situated between iconic Schröder-House designed the physical decay of a ruin, the by Gerrit Rietveld for his lover in erosion of social meanings, and the Dutch city of Utrecht. The first planning aspirations once material- house considered to be “modernist,” ized in the house, or as the title Rietveld’s abode had no mirrors indicates, in the act of mirroring in it—because the mirror, in the and reflecting. architect’s view, created a space The Chinese-spoken sound­ that was beyond the control of the track is based on the text “A Col­lec­ architect. The site where normally tion of Portraits” written by Hu Fang. a “self” meets its image in every Sixteen characters emerge before house is at the same time the blind our mind’s eyes. Most of them are spot of planning—a space that identified by their professions escapes human control. and by scenes from their everyday lives, while others appear only Anton Vidokle, born 1965 as poetic contours or projective in Russia, lives and works aphorisms. The portrait as a genre in New York; Hu Fang, born is about creating an image; it is a 1970 in China, lives and mimetic mirror of a person, a self— works in Guangzhou and such a “self” is the very origin Anton Vidokle, Hu Fang, Two Suns, 2012, HD video, colour, sound. and vanishing point of any picture Cinematography by Marcello Bozzini 32 � 3 33 Pak Sheung Chuen Taipei Notes: the country after he returned home. 2011.11.19–2011.11.28 A similar project is Alternative Tokyo Travel Project 2: Valley’s Trip (2007), Pak Sheung Chuen’s playful work for which the artist travelled from slyly alters the experience of southern to northern Tokyo by walk- everyday life. He explores, on the ing only in the areas corresponding one hand, the mental and social to the middle folds of his map. For “space” between everything that his project Going Home for the is structured, routine, and stable Taipei Biennial 2010, Pak looked in our world, and on the other, for people in the TFAM lobby who he investigates coincidence, would allow him to accompany chance encounters, the arbitrary, them to their homes. and the imaginative. In so doing, His work in the Taipei Biennial he reveals artistic moments in 2012, Taipei Notes: 2011.11.19– everyday life and brings to the 2011.11.28 is part of the L (Phase fore the interwoven nature of real- I), which consists of ideas and ity and the imaginary. He prefers observations systematically written to use himself and his writings as down in notebooks—a collection a medium, conceiving his works of “artistic gestures,” the everyday as actions or subtle manipulations birth of artistic “fictions.” The notes of the regular course of events. come from a trip to Taipei that In most cases these performative he undertook in November 2011 actions have no audience; rather, and are presented as text on the they consist of journeys and self- windows facing the internal court- experiments that engage with yard of the museum. ever-changing environments. In an earlier work called Wait- Pak Sheung Chuen, born 1977 ing for a Friend (Without Appoint- in China, lives and works in ment), Pak went to the Hong Kong Hong Kong Airport waiting area and waited until someone he knew walked out. He has also created a large permanent installation in the New York Public Library. In this project, the artist folded page twenty- two of every second book in the library. Another work consisted of a five-day trip to Malaysia, during which he kept his eyes closed the whole time; he took Pak Sheung Chuen, Taipei Notes: 2011.11.19–2011.11.28, detail pictures so he could discover of handwritten notes 34 � 4 35 Willem Oorebeek Sea = Land, 2012 People’s Republic of China. The Mary Kelly BLACKOUT, 2009 magazines were given to Oorebeek Scéance BLACKOUT (London by his wife, who travelled in China, sofa), 2012 although he himself has never set More ELLE, 2012 foot in Asia. He is interested in the standardization of Elle covers as For twelve years, Willem Oorebeek a sign of visual “globalization”. has produced blackouts; he takes The gesture in Sea=Land is existing popular images, blows similar to the gesture Oorebeek them up, and covers them with uses when making a blackout. black ink so only the contours stay By crumpling up and then unfold- visible. In the Taipei Biennial 2012 ing a historical map of Taiwan, he shows four works. Mary Kelly he emphasizes the contours of BLACKOUT is a blackout of a post- information and the arbitrariness er from an exhibition by the artist and politics involved when choos- Mary Kelly called Post-Partum ing what information is included Document, mounted at the Generali in a map and what is not. A simple Foundation in 1998. In this project rupture in the way the map is Mary Kelly collected images of her presented echoes the represent- son to serialize and historicize his ability of a standard whose reliabil- growth process. Willem Oorebeek ity is generally left unquestioned. bought the poster to make it into a blackout and thus appropri- Willem Oorebeek, born 1953 ate the images. in Holland, lives and works Scéance BLACKOUT (London in Brussels Sofa) is a blackout of a poster show- ing the couch from Sigmund Freud’s London apartment. Freud, the found- er of psychoanalysis, heavily influ- enced the development of thought and historical analysis in Europe. Scéance BLACKOUT (London Sofa) is mounted on a panel in eccentric position, hinting at the absence of something in the frame. According to the laws of visual organization in mass media, the empty space would be the space for a header, columns of text, and captions. More ELLE is the print-over Willem Oorebeek, More ELLE, 2012, lithography on paper, of two Elle magazines from the mounted on dibond, 115 × 92 cm 36 � 5 37 Yu-Cheng Chou AURORA, 206 B.C.– 220 differently from the way “antiques” A.D. / 2012 are usually displayed. Rather than The Forgotten Mr. E.P. Gao, underscoring the status of the 2012 antiques as “treasures from the Mr. Po-Lin Yang with his past,” Chou’s display renders Bronze Sculpture, 2012 them “spectacularized,” placed in a postmodern designed vitrine “Things” derive their status and under moving lights. How is value meaning from their context and produced through context and the practices that reproduce and aura, and what does the evalua- uphold them. They become identi- tion—and de-valuation—of the fied through recognizable signs— past mean in the present? These just like in the social world. It is questions are further enhanced through language, gestures and by the content of the vitrine: figu- style that we reveal our member- rines of servants meant to function ship in particular milieus. But if as grave goods, or helpers of the detached and taken out of context, dead in the afterlife. these signs and gestures lose Another work by Chou also their fixed meanings and identity. highlights and subverts the role It is through the method of —and spatial “grammar”—of the de- and re-contextualization that gallery and the institution of the Yu-Cheng Chou plays with the rela- museum, as he places everyday tion between source and product, objects such as drink bottles— meaning and materiality. In his as if left by construction work- work, he uses strategies and ers—on the metal tubes of the “tricks” of design to achieve subtle air-conditioning system, one of displacements of meaning, which the recent additions to the first- produce moments of wonder and floor gallery in the TFAM. His third surprise, and initiate a reflection contribution is on the upper floors on the frames that define what and consists of the placement, we see and know. in two similar architectural spots, His work for the Taipei Biennial of two similar-looking sculptures consists of three such displace- by artist Yang Po-Lin, which are ments and interventions. The first found in the TFAM collection. piece, entitled Aurora, is a coop- eration with a company based in Yu-Cheng Chou, born 1976 in Taiwan that holds a world-renowned Taiwan, lives and works in Taipei collection of Chinese antiques. A group of objects from this collec- tion is shown in the Biennial Yu-Cheng Chou, AURORA, 206 B.C. – 220 A.D / 2012, pottery figurine. exhibition, but it is displayed quite Photo: The AURORA Art Museum; Courtesy of The AURORA Art Museum 38 � 6 39 Simon Fujiwara The Museum of Incest, café in the basement. The base- 2009 – 2010 ment café is an integral part of the museum architecture for its focus The Museum of Incest is Simon on the meal as a family gathering Fujiwara’s fictive museum dedicat- activity. In the café, one wall is ed to the preservation and memory covered with a mural by Simon of incest practices throughout Fujiwara’s father that depicts a history. Composed of an archi- family dinner. The artist zooms in tectural scheme that incorporates on the relationship between the fragments of his own architect father and the son in the image. father’s unrealized designs with This painting is also displayed in landmark museum architecture, an the installation. By bringing his overtly personal story is inserted own persona into the incest frame, into an otherwise grander narrative Simon Fujiwara makes apparent in a parody of an academic lecture. a negotiation between fact and The museum is said to be fiction and adds to the fictional situated in the Olduvai Gorge in persona that he creates for himself Tanzania, the place where science as an artist. has located the so-called Cradle of Civilization. Just as the develop- Simon Fujiwara, born 1982 ment of humankind is based on in UK, lives and works in Berlin a collection of historical remains, here the history and development of incest are pieced together based on objects from an imagined time when incest was prevalent or unavoidable. Though incest tends to be left out of most museums, here the artist approaches incest as a natural phenomenon in the development of mankind. The installation consists of two vitrines containing objects, a large mural, a video in which the artist intro- duces the museum, and a printed museum guide. Simon Fujiwara takes up the role of the designer of the museum. The museum contains three Simon Fujiwara, The Museum of Incest, 2009–2010, mixed media parts: The Upper Galleries, the installation, performance and guidebook. Courtesy of Simon Fujiwara Pictures Gallery and the museum and Collection Filiep and Mimi Libeert, Belgium 40 � 7 41 Yervant Gianikian Angela Ricci Lucchi Triptych of the 20th Century, projection The Wounded Body

2002 – 2008 examines the direct effect of war Violence, 2012 on the human body by showing Oh! Man, 2003 a close-up of a brain surgery, but The Wounded Body, 2004 the artists also zoom in on the less visible psychological effects of “For us the past does not exist, war, like nervous disorders. To the nor does nostalgia, only the pres- Defeated is a two-channel projec- ent does.” Yervant Gianikian and tion that places opposing images Angela Ricci Lucchi are pioneers side by side. On the left-hand side, of an avant-garde cinema that a woman is cooking duck in a departs from found footage and hyper-modern kitchen—a typical the cinematic ready-made, as image of American post-war they work with lost and salvaged consumerism—while on the right- images from archives, above all hand side, we see images of people those documenting colonialism and devastated by hunger due to war. the wars of the twentieth century. The controversial title points to Working together since the early the cause of the difference: the seventies, their films are overtly “winners of history” are here juxta- political in nature—meditations on posed with those whose defeat was the way violence and terror have terminal. The third part, Terrorism, come to shape the present and our also consists of two projections. imaginary, and counter-ideological They show the downward spiral of calls for universality in history. They economic deprivation and cultural possess their images as scholars destruction that people get trapped and collectors just as much as in during war. The images show they are possessed by them. They the effects of years of hunger and re-film everything they use in their homelessness, and people turning work, steeping those images in into ghosts of themselves. These colors and manipulating them into pictures are juxtaposed with images sequences, thus folding past into of various religious motifs, sugges- presence. tive of the role of institutionalized Triptych of the 20th Century belief in provoking as well as com- is a five-channel video installation pensating for the actual violence. that is built from three parts: The Wounded Body, To the Defeated, Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci and Terrorism. Together, these three Lucchi, born 1942 in Italy, live parts show the consequences and and work in Milan Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Triptych of the 20th Century, horrors of war. The one-channel 2002–2008, 5-channel video installation, colour, sound, 4 min 50 sec 42 8 43 Maryam Jafri Avalon, 2011 Day of a number of nations in Independence Day Africa and Asia. The images all 1936–1967, 2009–ongoing have a similar, recognizable setup, including a leader who takes over Avalon starts with an interview with a nation, a leader who gives over an entrepreneur in an unidentified a nation, and a declaration that is Asian country. The man started signed. Maryam Jafri emphasizes a business that secretly exports the identical formal staging of fetish wear to the West. We learn these events and the images of that he ended up in the business them as a symbol for the way the not out of a personal interest, but Western nation-state model has for economic reasons, as he found been desired by and exported to that there was a demand in Europe the ex-colonies. The photos are and America that was not being arranged on the wall as a story- met. So he started catering to the board and a grid, a formal mold, needs of the West. in which the new nation-state takes In the video, several people its place. Maryam Jafri is inter- talk about how they hide parts ested in this in-between moment, of their identities in private or in the twenty-four-hour twilight zone public life, and which roles they between a territory being a colony take up in order to either fulfill their and it becoming a nation-state. psychological needs or to be an accepted citizen in society. The Maryam Jafri, born 1972 in work features interviews with a Pakistan, lives and works leather fetish clothing designer and in New York and Copenhagen with people who use the items in either their professional or private lives. The power relationship and the center and the periphery shi ft constantly throughout the video, as it becomes clear how much power is in the hands of the one who fulfills the needs of the other. This upside- down power dynamic resonates in geopolitical relationships as we zoom in on the personal stories of two people who occupy opposite roles in a role-playing game. Independence Day 1936–1967 shows a series of photographs taken on the first Independence Maryam Jafri, Avalon, 2011, HD video, colour, sound, 11 min 44 sec 44 � 9 45 John Akomfrah The Unfinished It alludes to, for instance, the Conversation, 2012 crucial role of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 that caused a John Akomfrah is the director of Europe-wide exodus from commu- numerous award-winning films nist parties, and to the Suez Crisis, dedicated to the experience of the British-French-Israeli invasion colonialism, diaspora, and resis- of Egypt after Egypt’s President tance. He is one of the founders Nasser recognized the People’s of the Black Audio Film Collective, Republic of China and nationalized which was active between 1982 the Suez canal, one of the world’s and 1998, and whose ground- most important economic arteries. breaking activities placed racism This imperialist invasion sparked and black identity on the public mass protests in Britain, and agenda in Britain. both events ultimately demanded His new work, The Unfinished a rethinking of previous leftist Conversation, is devoted to Stuart orthodoxies. Hall, a theorist of cultural identity Akomfrah describes the work and difference who exerted great as an exercise in “spectropoetics”: influence on Akomfrah and the a re-visitation of the ghosts that collective movement in which he haunt a life, and an interrogation was involved. Hall arrived in the of the fundamental transformations UK from Jamaica (then still a Brit- in the imaginary that those haunt- ish colony) in the 1950s, graduated ings ultimately produce. Hence, from Oxford, and went on to become the work moves between Hall’s a decisive voice on the New Left voice, ideas, memories, inventions, alongside other intellectuals such and insights, and immerses his as E.P. Thompson and Raymond biography in historical events. For Williams. Hall, identity is never a finished The Unfinished Conversationis product or a given reality. Rather, a three-screen “narrative construc- it is an ever-changing relation tion” of the multiple realities of one that emerges in-between subjects of the world’s most eminent thinkers and history—as, in his words, —a thinker who is a product of an “unfinished conversation.” both Europe and the Caribbean, and whose interests and concerns John Akomfrah, born include Marxism, nuclear disarma- 1957 in Ghana, lives and ment, culture, race, television, works in London cultural politics, and diasporic identities. The Unfinished Conver- sation focuses on Hall’s “formative John Akomfrah, The Unfinished Conversation, 2012, 3-channel HD years” in the 1950s and 1960s. video installation, colour, sound, 46 min 46 � 10 47 Rajkamal Kahlon Did You Kiss the Dead in US custody. The reports employ Body?, 2009–present a rational scientific language to A Tale of Modern Monsters, catalogue the internal and external 2012 details of the men’s bodies while attempting to determine a cause Rajkamal Kahlon’s paintings, of death, ranging from “natural” to collages, and installations are “undetermined” to “suicide.” The surgical in nature, opening up the title of the work—Did you Kiss the very bodily presence of colonial Dead Body?—is a reference to the histories. The first thing we recog- last line of Harold Pinter’s poem nize in the paintings in the series “Death,” read by Pinter during Did You Kiss the Dead Body are his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance European anatomical illustrations speech, a speech marked by sharp drawn with ink on paper. They criticism of American foreign policy are educational illustrations, but and reflections on the nature of they may also make us think of truth, language, and power. the “ecstatic” medieval tortures A new work by Rajkamal Kahlon of punishment. At first sight, is a large wall painting with a sculp- the innocent beauty of the red tural component. The tree, a symbol and pink patterns of the paper of the cycles of nature and life, here obliterates any association with bears fruit in the form of disintegrat- violence and bodily disintegration. ed human fingers. The finger is the The technique of marbling has its instrument of pointing, and the tree origins in Iraq and Turkey, and it figured by Kahlon here may be read is used here as a way to refer to as a delirious, dream-like vision, the living interior of the body. But through which the gestural “mean- upon a second look, we come ing” of dismembered bodies make to recognize that behind those its claims on the present. drawings there is text, documents. These documents are autopsy Rajkamal Kahlon, born 1974 in reports and death certificates from USA, lives and works in Berlin US military bases and prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were controversially made public on the American Civil Liberties Union’s website in 2004 under the Freedom of Information Act. The texts highlight relations of abuse and power through descriptions of anonymous Iraqi and Afghan male Rajkamal Kahlon, Did You Kiss the Dead Body? (detail), 2009, series of prisoners, young and old, who died ink drawings on marbled u.s. military autopsy report, each 28.3 × 36.6 cm 48 11 49 Joven Mansit Tabloid News, 2012 contemporary myth and historical Huli, 2012 experience at once. Tres Paganus, 2010 Among the works by Joven Ammo Dump Explosion Mansit on display is a series of Rocks South Manila, 2011 oil paintings using pages from the English-language Philippine Joven Mansit is a painter whose newspaper Daily Pacifican as work is based on Philippine history. backdrops. The pages come from In his deceptively realistic painterly the 1940s and the headlines situate re-creations of old photographs us in World War II. The scenes and documents, he achieves a painted onto the newspaper transformation of the “historical depict figures covering their heads document.” The document is with the so-called “bayong,” a liberated from its indexical relation Filipino basket. This image is itself to past events, and becomes an an “icon” of sorts, immediately imaginary scene which disrupts recognizable as an image of trai- the present—inscribed into popular tors: the Makapili, or Alliance of fictions, carrying latent memories, Philippine Patriots. The Makapili a fractured representation of a was a militant group formed in the living mythology. In other words, Philippines during WWII that gave Mansit blurs the line between military aid to imperial Japan. The representation and the waking Makapili are best remembered for dream—or even the hallucinations aiding the Japanese by pointing —of history. But not only does out insurgents while covering their he meticulously re-paint historical heads with the bayong in order images, thus fictionalizing and to conceal their identity. The head mythologizing them. Above all, and face is also a key motif that he is a collagist and a manipula- Mansit alters and manipulates tor of images, icons, signs, and in his other works. It is an image symbols. In his compositions, he of the named and the nameless, transforms what the images depict of a playful engagement with into scenographies of Filipino both fundamentally uncertain history that take the shape of a and haunted identities. historical theatre of the absurd. It is in the realm of the surreal and Joven Mansit, born 1984 the absurd that images open up to in the Philippines, lives and multiple associations—but where works in Manila they lead us is nevertheless not left to chance. Rather, Mansit’s paintings transport us into a realm Joven Mansit, Huli, 2011, oil on 1940’s newspaper, 47.5× 29.5 cm. of dismembered icons, capturing Courtesy of Miguel S. Tomacruz Collection 50 � 12 51 Harun Farocki Parallel, 2011-2012 image-worlds in which images have become what he calls “ideal- Harun Farocki systematically draws typical.” In the new mimetic para- our attention to the way in which digm of digital “realism”, reality is no images, technologies, and systems longer the measure of the always of representation define social and imperfect image; instead, the virtual political space, consciousness, image increasingly becomes the subjectivities, structures of feeling, measure of an always-imperfect and ideologies. actuality. With the “ideal-typical” In this new work, Farocki juxta- image, representation seeks to poses the history of computer- overcome lived reality by construct- based animation with elements ing, monitoring, and governing of art history. In only thirty years, it. Even fantasy and fiction now computer-generated images and tend to assume a predictive and animations have evolved from even preventive quality. Does this simple symbolic forms into images leave actual, lived reality to exist that aspire to perfect simulation, only as derivation of the ideal, as and seem to desire to outperform flaw or impurity, or, like in military cinematographic and photographic or surveillance technologies, as a representations, not merely of potential threat? Have these ideal- “static” reality, but increasingly types become our new normative of the dynamic aspects of life, as schemes, all-encompassing idols manifest in gestures or complex capable of scripting and predicting movement in general. In appropri- all actual life-movement? ating the dynamics of social and One more time, Parallel ques- natural reality, does computer- tions the notion of “progress” that generated hyperrealism seek to underlies histories of art and repre- outdo reality itself? sentation based on a linear, evolu- Today, mimesis has become tionary progression from imperfect a matter of generative algorithms, representation (mimesis) to more and the resulting technologies are accurate, complex, and perfect increasingly capable of calculating, forms. Parallel is like an inter- predicting, and controlling complex rogation of possible other stories, processes—from manufacturing, to evolutions, or reverse-evolutions of war, to emotional experiences in the which the image-surfaces of digital animated worlds of mass entertain- animation and their underlying ment. Underlying Farocki’s investi- generative algorithms speak. gation into the frontiers of innova- tion in current image-technologies Harun Farocki, born 1944 in is the assumption that increasingly, German-annexed Czecho- Harun Farocki, Parallel, 2012, 2-channel HD video installation, we live in technologically produced slovakia, lives and works in Berlin colour, sound, 17 min 52 13 53 Kao Chung-Li The Taste of Human Flesh, Chung-Li’s father was born in 2010 – 2012 the year of the May 4th Movement, The Way Station Trilogy, and thus his biography stands 1987 – 2012 for the Chinese historical experience of the twentieth century, set against Kao Chung-Li’s work investigates the global histories of colonization, the relationship between history the wars of decolonization, and the and personal biography, between struggles against neo-colonialism time, images, and media. He is in the era that has called itself a photographer and a collector of “globalization.” What is being told historical pictures as much as here is a counter-story to the hege- a filmmaker, animator, and media- monic version of a “universal history” archeologist. “Taking a picture entailed in the propagandistic means an interruption of reality. promise of progress and modern- Showing that picture means a ization. The universality of historical cessation of fantasy,” states the experience —that is, general validi- artist. For him, the slideshow ty beyond a particular context— in particular sustains a tension is here equated with the systemic between image, time, and still- violence suffered by the vast ness—and is situated beyond majority of humanity under colonial fantasy and reality, subsuming and imperialistic regimes. “History both photography’s indexical is like a language; it is not merely relation to past events, and the some random noises. A lot of histo- expectancy of cinematic time ries are like dialects—restricted and storytelling. by region. Some histories, however, The protagonist of both works— cannot be so restricted,” states a slideshow and a new video— the artist in commenting on the shown here is Kao Chung-Li’s work. “If we compare my fathers age father, now 93 years old. The story to a language, I think we ought told spans more than 90 years. to learn that language, at least A key motif in this work is the bullet enough to comprehend it.” in the father’s body, which The Way Station has remained in his lower cranium Trilogy completes the biography, since the days of the Chinese interlacing the father’s recollection Civil War. Shot in the head by the with animated scenes, childhood Liberation Army during the Huaihai Campaign in 1948–49—a battle own life. that was decisive for the victory of Communists over the KMT— Kao Chung-Li, born 1958 in this bullet has remained as a mate- Taiwan, lives and works in Taipei Kao Chung-Li, The Taste of Human Flesh, 2010–2012, slideshow rial witness. cinema I, 15 min 54 � 14 55 Fernando Bryce Asia, 2006 paternalistic way in which the local context was represented, which Fernando Bryce copies existing later gave way to images of an texts and images that he finds enemy when the situation changes in publication archives. He focuses during World War II. on documents that were published Through reproduction, the in relation to shifts in geopolitical images and text look at first power, such as World War II, like ironic representations, but then European colonization, and Pan- you realize that the artist didn’t Americanism. The artist refers add anything—the content was to his technique as “mimetic analy- there already and the statements sis.” He copies the existing text circulated among large groups of and image in his own aesthetic style, people, consolidating public opin- which is characterized by simple ion. Also, by putting the documents drawings that resemble of mid- in an art context where cultural twentieth century cartoons, and capital is generated, the attention he replaces the texts with handwrit- shifts to another dimension, where ten commentaries that have other forms of representation are calligraphic traits. produced. In this case, the docu- Asia, the work presented in the ments are restaged by anachronistic Biennial, is made up of copies witnesses that bring to mind of a series of covers of the American obstinate imperial representations. magazine Asia, which was later called Asia and the Americas. Fernando Bryce, born 1965 in This North American magazine was Peru, lives and works in Berlin very popular in the 1920s and 1930s and was an important source of information for what was happening in the Middle and East Asia at the time. Like in many of his other works, Bryce organizes this series of covers in chronological order which makes a line of think- ing becomes apparent, as well as a shift in representation based on the politics that were in vogue at that point. The series of Asia magazines give a distinct impres- sion of how the East was perceived in the West in the 1920s and 1930s. Fernando Bryce, Asia (detail), 2006, ink on paper, series of 50 drawings, They show the stereotypical and each 30 × 21 cm. Courtesy of collection of Diana and Moisés Berezdivin 56 � 15 57 Liu Ding The Un-erasable, 2012 and a stage where these works will be displayed. Together with the Since 2009, Liu Ding has collected Beijing-based artist Li Ran, each “everyday” artworks from online work, while being installed, will auctions, flea markets, and friends. be the subject of a conversation These include paper-cuts, embroi- and a detailed interrogation. dery, sketches, watercolor paint- The installation process will be ings, oil paintings, woodcuts, and simultaneously filmed with a video sculptures, most of whose motifs, camera set outside the booth and styles, and genre are familiar directly facing the artists. On the and common. Yet these artworks second day, in the very same booth hold no “special” status, signifi- where the collection is on view, cance, or value. Typically they are Liu Ding, Li Ran, and the Taiwanese gifts or souvenirs, they decorate scholar and art historian Meiling homes or hotel lobbies, or they are Cheng will discuss the collection made as part of an artist’s training in an attempt to bring it into a or by an amateur. They are part direct relationship with us today. of history and our experience of art This discussion will also be and aesthetics, but without having recorded on video. At the end of a distinct place in art history. the performances, the two videos And yet they express and reflect will remain unedited and on view the sensibilities, desires, and on two TV screens installed outside states of consciousness of their the booth, with the collection makers just as much as the social remaining on display throughout context in which they exist. the exhibition. Liu Ding says that he wishes to act like as “agent” for those works, Liu Ding, born 1976 in China, as he seeks to make them visible lives and works in Beijing and bring them to consciousness, choreographing or “staging” their appearance and interrogating how they shape the perception of art. Each work he acquires for his collection is mounted in a new frame, usually in bright colors. Liu Ding places his artistic signature on those frames. On the opening day of the Taipei Biennial, Liu Ding will mount a selection of his collection in an Liu Ding, The Un-erasable, 2012, performance, mixed media installation. installation consisting of a booth Courtesy of Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne 58 16 59 Joachim Koester Calcutta Served as a Basis bringing their opium addictions for British Expansion in the along with them. East, 2005 –2007 The result of Koester’s research is a text and the photographs “They are not dead, but sleeping,” Calcutta Served as a Basis for wrote Thomas De Quincey in 1822 British Expansion in the East. in his Confessions of an English Though Joachim Koester set out Opium Eater. De Quincey was to find traces of the opium history an important writer in the literary in the local official museums, genre called drug literature. In his he found that they had been omitted book, he introduces opium as a from the official history. The image gateway to “the secret inscriptions on the left, of an elephant being of the mind,” with guidelines for lifted onto a boat, is a photograph using the drug both to intensify of a print that he found in a book aesthetic pleasure and to recall he bought in Calcutta. The image forgotten memories, a more on the right is a photo that the artist frightening enterprise. Joachim took of the ruins of an ancient Koester looks into drug history Bhadralok palace. The Bhadralok by researching the opium trade were a class of gentlefolk that that the British East India Company were close to the English and arose set up with China. during colonial times. The book Calcutta played a major role mentions that they would feed opium in this history, as it was here to their dogs as a parlor game. that the opium was auctioned off and shipped to China. In 1830 Joachim Koester, born 1962 the trade made up one-sixth in Denmark, lives and works of the gross national product of in Copenhagen British India. The trade led to two Opium Wars, one in 1841 and one in 1856. The First Opium War ended with the signing of The Nanking Treaty in August 1842, one of the most humiliating defeats in Chinese history, which secured the British opium trade in China and ultimately created millions of Chinese opium addicts. They would often end up so desti- tute that they were forced to Joachim Koester, Nanking Restaurant. Tracing Opium in Calcutta (detail), immigrate and work as cheap 2005–2008, Series of 3 silver gelatin black and white photographs. laborers in Europe and the US, Courtesy of Jan Mot, Brussels 60 � 17 61 Jompet Kuswidananto War of Java, Do You In the middle of the nineteenth Remember? #2, 2008 century, when the Dutch began to build sugar factories in the north War of Java, Do You Remember? coastal region of Java, a particular #2 is a part of Jompet Kuswidan- practice emerged among the anto’s extensive research project plantation workers and sugar farm- that looks into the complexities ers. A ritual called “cembengan” of Indonesian cultural history. The was created, which accompanied War of Java was fought between the initial processing of the sugar 1825 and 1830, sparked by the cane into sugar. This ritual rebellion of Prince Diponegoro was conducted amidst the large in response to the plans of Dutch machines that ground the sugar colonizers to build a road across cane. Workers performed a land where his parents’ tomb dance that invoked the spirits was located. of their ancestors. In the context For Jompet Kuswidananto, of the colonial factory, the ritual Indonesian society is in a permanent addressed the experience of transitory state. It evolves amidst colonialism and factory work as layers of living traditions, in the a new cosmological bond, interstices of the aporias of colo- expressed as a bodily-mimetic nial, postcolonial, and neocolonial relation between humans and states, and in the space between machines, an inversion of the ortho- the ever-blurred and ideological dox-”modern” perception that distance marking the “traditional” divides the magical and the and the “modern.” This ever-transi- mechanical. This dance, perhaps, tory reality forever bears the was not “magic”—but rather a imprint of the colonial scene, just way of relating to and disarming as those roads built over tombs. the magic of the modern factory Thus, the War of Java has never regime, of capitalist exploitation, ended, but rather persists while and of the colonial spell. continually changing its face. Jompet Kuswidananto is interested Jompet Kuswidananto, born in the images and narratives that 1976 in Indonesia, lives and live and renew themselves in this works in Jakarta “haunted” zone of contradictions, and particularly in the way they shape bodies, and the way bodies negotiate those histories. War of Java, Do You Remember? #2 recollects such negotiations Jompet Kuswidananto, War of Java, Do You Remember? #2, 2008, from Indonesian colonial history. video, black and white, sound, 7 min 62 � 18 The Museum of the Monster that is History Curated by James T. Hong and Anselm Franke Participating Artists: Reza Abedini, Bavand Behpoor, James T. Hong, Hou Chun-Ming, Jei Li, Kelvin Kyung Kun Park, Eyal Weizman, Paulo Tavares, Steffen Krämer, Tony Chun-Hui Wu, Yao-chung Wu and anonymous contributors

Monstrosity in modern times by radical ruptures and permanent surely comes in plentiful forms, transformations, it is in the insistent but its most poignant face is irrationality of officially sanctioned, not modern fiction, but actual systemic terror, as experienced violence enacted in the name in colonial subjugation, genocide, of rationality. The Museum of the imperial wars, cultural destruc- Monster That Is History is devoted tion, and disciplinary measures, to the violence on which modern that we must locate its actual and states and social orders are based. strikingly consistent continuity. It looks at the violence that fore- Turning towards this continuity in goes any “modern” organization modern history reveals that there of society (which never disappears is a particular systemic economy at its margins within and without) of terror necessitated by the rule of 1 and in those institutions that guard “modern reason” itself, and hence them. It highlights the monstrosities official terror is not an exception, exerted in the name of reason and but rather modernity’s history- order, or in the name of a lesser evil making rule. This side of modern to serve a greater perceived good. rationality presents us with a symp- State-sanctioned forms of terror tom running counter to the promise are monstrous not merely because of progress: modernity as the of the scale of destruction afforded permanent invention of a barbarity by modern technologies, but more that hides behind the mask of civili- so because of their “normality.” zation, order, and rationality. While perhaps considered unfor- The Museum of the Monster tunate, state terror is still accepted That Is History comprises various as necessary and legitimate at contributions. Taiwan WMD identi- a given moment within a particular fies weapons of mass destruction regime, or in the name of a univer- as its monstrous historical subject. salist science. And indeed while The international community modern history is characterized has taken steps to ban or at least 2 65 control the spread of WMDs by scholar Jie Li; another to decap- (weapons of mass destruction), but itation as an iconographic and Taiwan is not officially a part political motif which persists both of this international community. in Chinese history and in modernity And since Taiwan (ROC) was born at large; and another to the Irish- as a state of emergency in a state man Roger Casement, who served of exception, WMDs are especially the British government and well-suited for just such states and authored two famous “reports” just such emergencies. Compiled on systematic colonial terror in the by James T. Hong, with contribu- Congo and the Amazon around tions by Tony Wu and Kelvin Park, the turn of the twentieth century. this exhibit presents the rarely During WWI the British would documented and much contested execute Casement as a traitor. history of these types of weapons Cultural theorist and artist within and around Taiwan. Bavand Behpoor, together with 3 The end of World War II graphic designer Reza Abedini, signaled both the creation of contribute an installation on the modern Asian states and the inau- “martyrs museum,” a form of guration of their state-supported museum found worldwide which WMD programs, which were palpably exemplifies the funda- kick-started by Japanese WWII ments of modern states in martyr- research units, such as Unit 731 dom, as the sacrifice of individuals in China and Unit 31 in Taiwan, and their bodies. The museum and by preparations for the coming that they restage in parts, however, Cold War. One such example is is the rather particular Shiraz The Report of G., which outlines Martyrs Museum in Iran, which WWII Japanese experiments with addresses itself to foreigners the glanders bacterium, a weapon- but is hardly visited by them, and ized horse disease, on primarily relies in several respects on Chinese prisoners. Prepared by a metaphysics of absence, Japanese biological warfare in opposition to Western concepts scientists for the US government of the museum. Their ”translated” in 1949, this report impeccably martyrs museum hosts a variety represents the utilization of medi- of “typical” objects and accompa- cine, science, and rationality for nying martyr narratives that the efficient production of terror. in themselves exhibit the gap Supplementing these exhibits, between the systemic rationale and The Museum of the Monster That individual history. Is History dedicates a series of Another section of the museum vitrine displays to particular histori- is devoted to the role of traitors: cal aspects of “the rationality those who betray the norms of their of terror”: one is dedicated to the respective countries or communi- 4 Great Famine in China, conceived ties and “cross” enemy lines. In the 66 � 18 popular imagination, they are either gies advance, and the identities embodiments of evil or larger-than- of perceived perpetrators adapt, life personalities. The traitor here symbolic atonements and scientific is literally looked upon as a “figure,” research seek to document, represented by an idiosyncratic to uncover, and to put on record, selection of known and unknown as a prelude to possible forgive- figurines in the accessible size ness. Apologies, compiled by of twelve inches. This size seems James T. Hong, presents the “offi- to be the most appropriate for cial apologies” of statesmen and contemplating and perhaps perpetrators from various contexts appreciating their treasonous throughout the twentieth and early accomplishments. twenty-first centuries. The Mineral The museum then presents a Geology of Genocide, shot by display contemplating the “economy Paulo Tavares, Eyal Weizman, and of death” by looking at the “price Steffen Krämer, documents tags” and the monetary values a cutting-edge forensic investiga- of life. Just as a nation’s currency tion of mass graves in Guatemala, is relative to its strength and in an attempt to reconstruct the influence, so too is the value of unwritten, silenced history of state- its citizens. We imagine that all sanctioned violence. (James T. human lives are priceless, but Hong and Anselm Franke) we know that economic reality— represented, for instance, by compensation payments—speaks of another truth. The passage of time does not heal all wounds, and it cannot settle all accounts or resolve all disputes. So the final two exhibits offer attempts at preparing the ground for reconciliation and opening new chapters in history. As governments change, technolo-

1 James T. Hong, The Report of G, 1949 / 2012, documents, each 17.9 × 21.5 cm 2 Eyal Weizman, Paulo Tavares, Steffen Krämer, The Mineral Geology of Genocide, 2012, video, colour, sound 3 Jei Li, The Great Leap Forward and Famine, 2012, photographs 5 4 823 Artillery Bombardment. 1958 / 2012, video, colour, silent, collection of Tony Wu 5 Kelvin Kyung Kun Park, Invitation to a Peaceful City, 2005, HD video, colour, sound 68 � 19 69 Elisa Strinna Seismic Symphonies — studies the information intrinsic Taiwan Symphony, 2008 / 2012 to these elements of nature, various narratives come to life, What is “culture”? One common which reveal intrinsic “cultural” theory defines culture as that aspects of nature, and challenge which distinguishes humans any narrow conception of both from nature, and in Western-style cultural and natural processes. scientific disciplines, often the What is left, instead, are differences two are conceived as being in of scales, times, and languages, opposition. The common model which demand different forms has it that culture is something that of translation. has risen “above” nature. Hence, Seismic Symphonies—Taiwan natural processes both underlie, Symphony is a sound installa- and potentially undermine, cultural tion and sculpture. It translates processes, and culture must earthquake seismograms into rule and master nature, including a symphony, played on an organ. “human nature.” Other typical The organ reads the analogical scientific conceptions state that recording of the seismic shock like either we are entirely determined a score. The earthquake that is by nature and its laws, and culture “played” here took place in Taiwan is only an illusion, or the exact in 1999 and was the country’s opposite, that everything is a strongest earthquake of the last cultural “construction,” including twenty years. Seismic Sympho- our ideas of nature. Alongside nies - Taiwan Symphony is also a these common ideological stand- symbolic inversion: the instrument points and trenchlines, there of the organ is most commonly has been the explosive growth used in Christian churches, and of industrial culture, of science its sounds are derived from and technologies that have made the heavens and symbolize cosmic it increasingly difficult to say harmony. But here it is the earth, where “our” culture begins and “nature,” the ground beneath our “nature” ends. feet that is moving. It speaks to In her sculptures, installa- us not of harmony, but of our fragil- tions, and videos, Elisa Strinna ity, undermining our fantasies investigates and tests such distinc- of mastery. tions. She explores the way they structure our perception and our Elisa Strinna, born 1982 in Italy, fields of knowledge. She does this lives and works in Venice not through theoretical reflection, but by closely examining various Elisa Strinna, Seismic Symphonies—Taiwan Symphony, 2008 / 2012, natural materials. As Strinna sound installation, wood, plastic, iron, paper, 210 × 60 × 70 cm, 5 min 70 � 20 71 Adam Avikainen Ginger Glacier, 2012 mental realities and dimensions ± 5,000,000,000 years of life. The Ginger Glacier is a Adam Avikainen’s works—mainly monstrous, quasi-mythic non- installations that make use of vari- being that comes to us from a ous materials combined with his future geological age. It is pictured own writings—are like narratives by Avikainen as a mutation of life that unfold between idiosyncratic growing out of all life’s symbiotic observations and scientific find- relationship to the sun. Not only ings, calculations and projective do we owe our lives and all life narratives, which are often told by on earth to the sun, but according objects or things. Avikainen thus to current scientific prediction draws us into scenarios that are this giant gas ball on fire will have based on both rational predictions completely obliterated the earth and imaginary make-believe. What in about five billion years, while all all his work has in common is that oceans will have evaporated in one it re-scales human perception and billion years, a time in which there self-perception in relation to both will have been about twenty cata- the micro- and macrocosmos of clysmic extinction events. Conse- nature and geology, and situates quently, we humans have less than our bodies and minds within the fifty million years to drastically alter all-encompassing continuum of our physical bodies to withstand nature. Avikainen’s scenarios begin extreme heat. The Ginger Glacier when “humanity” as we know is a name for what will become it (as something beyond or in of our human bodies as well control of nature) ceases to exist. as all other elemental and spiritual They raise awareness of the life: a collective body composed multiple other actors that define of anarchic cellular life living and our fate—from the uncountable growing in symbiotic relationships, organisms such as bacteria a “frozen heat wave” that “dances that inhabit our bodies, to the with the sun.” large-scale processes of geology and the planet, in whose “body” Adam Avikainen, born 1978 we live just like the bacteria in in USA, lives and works in our belly. Avikainen’s work reac- Minnesota quaints us with the alterity of life in our own bodies and environ- ments. They bring us into close imaginative-sensory contact with Adam Avikainen, Ginger Glacier, 2012 ±5,000,000,000 years, frozen heat that familiar strangeness of wave in the form of Ginger Glacier’s skin and a monologue with itself volcanic, mineral, vegetal, and possessed by teenaged humans... 72 � 21 73 Angela Melitopoulos Maurizio Lazzarato Assemblages, 2011 – 2012 from things, and the individual The Life of Particles, from the collective—separations 2011 – 2012 Guattari saw as being at the root of Two Maps, 2012 contemporary crises. It was on these journeys that Guattari began to The starting point of the two-part develop an interest in animism and visual research projects Assem- studied so-called animist cultures blages and Life of Particles is and practices, in which subjectivity an interview conducted with the is not located in the human alone, French psychotherapist, political but distributed in polyphonic forms activist, and philosopher Felix throughout an environment. He Guattari in 1992. Guattari was a called these forms “assemblages.” major influence on the New Left The second part of this project, after 1968, and he is also known for Life Of Particles, is a journey that his collaborative work with philoso- begins with Guattari’s experi- pher Gilles Deleuze. His work ence in Okinawa, diving into the was directed against the modern imperial history of the region as Western concept of a patriarchal experienced on an everyday basis, and colonialist subjectivity. In his not least through the massive pres- La Borde clinic in France, Guattari ence of the US military since WWII. and colleagues helped advance Life Of Particles also enters into a worldwide movement against a dialogue with the contemporary dominant psychiatry, which they situation of Japan and the rela- regarded as an oppressive institu- tion between subjectivity, animist tion that violently enforced such spirituality, and modern technol- normative and alienated forms of ogy in the aftermath of the 2011 subjectivity. Working with patients, earthquake and nuclear disaster. In artists, theorists, and scientists, the separate installation Two Maps, they implemented a radical “politics photographer and anthropologist of experimentation” at La Borde. Chihiro Minato discusses both With archival material and the changes of landscape and the additional interviews by Guattari’s landscape of media in the aftermath colleagues and friends, Assem- of Fukushima. blages follows Guattari from La Borde to Brazil and Japan, two Angela Melitopoulos, born 1961 countries where he travelled exten- in Germany, lives and works sively in his quest for alternatives in Berlin; Maurizio Lazzarato, Angela Melitopoulos / Maurizio Lazzarato, Assemblages, 2011– 2012, to a Western ontology that sepa- born 1955 in Italy, lives and 3-channel video installation, colour, sound, 69 min. Installation view, rated nature from culture, signs works in Paris Animism, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2012. Photo: Arwed Messmer 74 � 22 75 Andreas Siekmann Trickle down—Public Space campaigns, and so-called regen- in the Era of its Privatization, eration policies. The backdrop of 2007 / 2012 this work is the increasingly global methods of the financial indus- Andreas Siekmann’s work revolves tries to make city governments around the representation and dependent as debtors, thereby visualization of the ever-abstract systematically undermining politics realms of economics, capital, and public control. and politics. How can politics and His graphic representations economics become visible, and take the form of visual narratives under which conditions? Essential in which complex processes are to his work is the analysis of the represented by symbols. His visual transformations and mutations language encompasses manifold of capitalism, the worldwide historical references, including, introduction of neoliberalism, and for instance, Otto Neurath’s the impact it has had on society, pictorial pedagogy of the 1930s. democracy, urban space, and He thus translates and transfers environments. He meticulously earlier attempts that sought to root researches the restructuring of particular techniques and artistic labor conditions under so-called methods within socio-political globalization and the systematic contexts into the present, evoking erosion of social structures. He both continuities and discontinui- interrogates the present conditions ties in the history of capital. of capitalist exploitation, neoliberal His graphic representa- propaganda, and the forms of politi- tions—maps or diagrams—allow cal camouflage they yield today. us to closely follow complex and Siekmann’s projects are networked processes of production long-term investigations, which and capital flows, and at the same materialize in the form of graphic time represent statistical informa- representations, drawings, sculp- tion and foster a “pedagogical,” tures, installations, films, and comparative approach to “data.” architectural models. His sculptural Through them we can permanently and installation work have focused switch between the particular and on the privatization and commer- the general, the concrete and cialization of urban space, on the the abstract, the “mere figure” “event”-city, and city marketing in and the realities and lives that are the wider sense. His investigation in-formed or enslaved by it. for the Taipei Biennial 2012 focuses on the close relationship between Andreas Siekmann, born 1961 Andreas Siekmann, Trickle down—Public Space in the Era of its artistic work, “creativity” as a in Germany, lives and works Privatization, 2007 / 2012, digital prints, 460 × 980 cm. Courtesy of Gallery marketing slogan, urban image- in Berlin Barbara Weiss, Berlin 76 � 23 77 Rosemarie Trockel Copy Me, 2012; Language However, calling Trockel a Change, 2012; Episches feminist artist would be too narrow Theater, 2012; As Far as a definition, as the set of authorita- Possible, 2012; Leading by tive systems that she aims at is Example, 2012; Less sauvage much broader. It includes any than Others, 2012; Copyright system that administers represen- is a Myth, 2012; Abstraction, tations of reality and prescribes 2012; 15 Minutes of Fame, predetermined positions. She 2012; True Colors, 2012; attacks established theories about Daily Trap, 2012 sexuality, culture, and artistic production. She inserts in her work Rosemarie Trockel became known characters with shifting identities in the eighties for her feminist and gender roles, parodies to works that addressed the status deconstruct societal phenomena, of women in the art world. Among which compliment her constant these works were knitted pictures investigation of theories from that consisted of large, mechani- anthropology and sociology. cally produced woolen material Drawings and collages have stretched over a canvas frame, often played a major role in her career. incorporating recognizable symbols She uses them to cut and paste such as the hammer and sickle images that represent themes or the Playboy logo. These works she has explored throughout her questioned the belittling way in oeuvre. The images are composed which feminine creativity was usually or decomposed like shattered approached. The fact that she had thoughts, creating a mingling of the works made using industrial established notions of reality and and mechanical fabrication raises the subconscious. These assem- the question of the authorship and blages showing the iconography authenticity of the works. and themes of her oeuvre result Another emblematic series in a supra-layer, which— coming from approximately the same with little explanation from the period is called Oven Burners. artist herself—leaves the viewer This series consists of cooking questioning his or her expectations plates that are mounted on a wall of materials, artworks, exhibitions, like canvases. Highlighting the and the subject matter treated traditional role that women are by Trockel. supposed to play, she uses the formalist arrangement of the plates Rosemarie Trockel, born 1952 to subversively allude to Minimal- in Germany, lives and works in ist Art, mastered solely by male Cologne strategists. Rosemarie Trockel, Copyright is a Myth, 2012, digital print, 90 × 70 cm 78 � 24 79 Ashish Avikunthak Vakratunda Swaha, 2010 The title thus frames the death of the young man as a sacrifice In the first scene of Vakrantunda which, like Ganesha’s departure, Swaha, a young man dips a Gane- frees man from bad faith. One sha idol in water on the last day recurring theme is the tonsure, the of the Ganapati Festival. During ritual shaving of one’s head. This this festival, a Ganesha symbol is Hindu ritual is traditionally carried worshipped for ten days, and then out by the oldest son after the loss on the eleventh day the statue of a family member. Whereas it is taken through the streets in a normally happens only once when procession to be immersed in a someone dies, in this film the river or the sea, symbolizing a ritual tonsure is performed three times, send-off of the Lord in his journey and on Ashish Avikunthak himself. towards his abode in Mount Kailash. By showing Avikunthak’s own As he leaves this world, he takes mourning, the film—which took him with him the misfortunes of all twelve years to finish—becomes men. The scene was shot in 1997, a cathartic document. and the young man in the footage is the artist Girish Dahiwale. The Ashish Avikunthak, born 1972 in scene was supposed to be part India, lives and works in Calcutta of a collective film manifesto that Ashish Avikunthak and three other artists planned to shoot, but they never finished the project. In 1998, Girish Dahiwale committed suicide. The film became a requiem for Avikunthak’s deceased friend. It stages the rite of passage that allowed the dead artist to enter into the other world. The film develops as a dreamlike sequence of scenes that confuse good and evil, fiction and reality. Vakrantunda literally means “twisted trunk,” one of eight forms of Ganesha that prevail over human weaknesses and demons. Swaha is the name of a deity asso- ciated with sacrifice. When sacri- fices are made, the name “Swaha,” which literally means “self-spoken” Ashish Avikunthak, Vakratunda Swaha, 2010, HD video, colour, or “spoken by me,” is chanted. sound, 21 min 80 � 25 The Museum of Crossings Curated by Anselm Franke and Hongjohn Lin First Part: Virlani Hallberg, Lin Swallow Y., and others Second Part: Hongjohn Lin; Costume Design: Tsai Chih-Hsien

The Museum of Crossings is of Crossings is devoted to different devoted to the crossing of borders. “morphologies” of crossing bound- The first association refers to aries. It looks at borders as mimet- the physical crossing of boundar- ic zones in which identity and ies, such as the borders of nation- alterity are in permanent exchange, states, which are crossed by and in which the imaginary and tourists, entrepreneurs (and their the fictional assume a powerful money and goods), migrants and role. The monster in this context smugglers, and agents and spies. is a figure of mimetic and morpho- The spy perhaps best exempli- logical powers who awaits those fies what this museum is about: attempting to transgress normative namely, that “borders” are zones or cosmological boundaries. of projections and mirror-effects, How is the border between guarded by (often stereotypical) the human and non-human images and frames, which can be guarded and upheld? Why is it that “passed” if one falls into a particu- monsters are frequently hybrids, lar scheme, assumes a good border-figures between human camouflage, or acts like a legitimate and animal, or between humans “type.” This is true not only of terri- and machines? How can we image torial borders, but of all borders the passage, the process of cross- of identity: borders are “mimetic ing, between animal and human, zones” in which identity and devia- between machine and man? tion, similarity and difference, are In a different register: How does guarded and negotiated. Above the symbolic order and cosmo- all, they are zones of contagion, logical representation change after of irreversible contact with alterity acts of destruction and violence? near and far, real or imagined, And again: How are we to imagine fictional or actual—and it is only the mimetic relation of any living because of this that they have organism to its environment, 1 become zones of control, of its “milieu”? hygiene and paranoia, the site The Museum of Crossings is of racism, xenophobia, and the divided into two parts. The first projective export and imputation part presents a series of “relational 1 of collective fears. The Museum diagrams,” or “border mappings.” 83 These are miniature stories and the curious desire for projecting cartographies, organized along the alterity of the other. Psalma- various lines of division in order nazar, despite having white skin to expose their very principles and blond hair, could get by as of construction. From the impact Formosan, partly because of his of the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests hyper-exotic performance of eating on cosmology, to the phenomena raw meat and sleeping with of mimicry in insects that visually his eyes open, and partly because “adapt” themselves to their of the lack of proper knowledge environment, to the policing of the about Taiwan in particular and line between the normal and ethnicity in general. The Museum pathological in psychiatry, to the of Psalmanazar is intended to “codes” of sexual politics, to realize his fantastical Formosa, so-called colonial mimicry and the invoking the crossing of his spirit apparently universal schemes from early Enlightenment London of racism, a seemingly “natural” to the Taiwan of the present. line of division in all cases is Different display techniques, espe- replaced with the always unstable cially the shifting of foreground and shifting distinction between and background, are employed to “passive” and “active” agents, recompose a skewed picture. The between a “figure” (active) and effect is to arrest the fleeting phan- a “background” (passive), and their tasmagorical images that have particular codependency. always divided the normal and the The second part of the Museum perverse, the primitive and the attends to the specific case of modern, the powerful and empow- 2 George Psalmanazar, the bogus ered, and the one and the other Taiwanese man who gained in rendering cognitive relations a reputation in learned social at the crossroads of the fantasti- circles in early eighteenth-century cal and the real Taiwan. (Anselm London. His book An Historical Franke and Hongjohn Lin) and Geographical Description of Formosa (1704), portraying a bizarre wonderland of naked savages, floating villages, Satan- ism, cannibalism, and human sacrifice, never failed to satiate

1 Museum of Psalmanazar, The Map of Formosa according to George Psalmanazar 3 2 Museum of Psalmanazar, Satan Worshipping 3 Virlani Hallberg, Receding Triangular Square, 2012, HD video, colour, sound 84 26 85 Danh Vo 02.02.1861, 2009 Théophane Vénard left France for the Far East in 1852 and Danh Vo’s works are closely worked in Hong Kong for fifteen connected to, and continuously months before being transferred reflect, his family’s history against to Vietnam, where he was captured the backdrop of a contemporary in 1860. He was given the option world increasingly defined by of renouncing his Christianity but migration and exile. Vo’s family refused. As a consequence, fled from Vietnam in 1980 and he was sentenced to decapitation. was picked up from their self-made The letter was written a few boat by a tanker from Denmark, days before he was killed on where they later received citizen- February 2, 1861. ship. Vo’s artistic strategy lies The letter is copied by Danh in the displacement of signs and Vo’s father each time it is sold meanings across the registers or an exhibition copy needs to be of secluded identities and histori- made, and this will happen until cal experience. His work seems demand runs out or until the father to suggest that in the aftermath dies. Danh Vo’s father—a Catholic of colonial and imperial mass himself—owes his handwriting displacement that characterizes skills to the fact that Vietnam, the world today, it is not “meaning” under French rule, adopted the as such that counts most, but Roman alphabet. Though these rather the way it is situated, mate- skills can help you get a better job in rialized, and enacted, thus position- Vietnam, they were never ing the negotiation of composite beneficial to Danh Vo’s father, identity within the question of since he did not master the Danish their “framing.” language after he arrived in In one of his researches, Danh Denmark. Vo followed the traces of French missionaries that were sent to Danh Vo, born 1975 in Vietnam, Southeast Asia in the nineteenth lives and works in Berlin century by the Society of Foreign Missions of Paris. He particu- larly looked into the lives of those missionaries that were murdered for their attempts to convert people to Christianity. The work 2.2.1861 is a hand- written copy of a farewell letter Danh Vo, 02.02.1861, 2009, last letter of Saint Theophane Vénard to written by the French missionary his father before he was decapitated, copied by Phung Vo, ink on paper, Théophane Vénard to his father. 29.6 × 21 cm 86 � 27 87 Hsu Chia-Wei Marshal Tie Jia, 2012 in the south of Fujian Province, recounting the experience of WWII. Hsu Chia-Wei’s new video installa- He is the last person capable tion engages with the history of of performing the opera, which has a tiny island off the coast of Matsu, a long tradition and was known which is situated in the Taiwan to be Ironclad Marshal’s favorite Strait. During the Qing Dynasty, the pastime, but which has now fallen island was the site of a tiny temple. into oblivion. When Chiang Kai-Shek retreated Next to the video, Hsu Chia- to Taiwan, the temple was disman- Wei has installed a mock-up of the tled and relocated to a larger tiny temple, similar to what he used neighboring island, and a bunker for the montage in the video. It is was constructed in its place. a reassembled temple made from At present, the bunker is a ruin and cinema props—the fictionalization ownership of the island has been of what the original temple might transferred again to the proprietors have looked like. Next to this of the original temple. The island is a letter on the wall, written by is also under the commandment Hsu, in which he asks the Ironclad of a local god called the “Ironclad Marshal for permission for his Marshal,” a frog deity. This deity action, lays down his vision originated from a temple located of contemporary art’s historical on Wu-Yi Mountain in China, which agency, and shows documentation was destroyed during the Cultural of the god’s response. Revolution, at which point the deity migrated to Matsu. Hsu Chia-Wei, born 1983 in In Hsu Chia-Wei’s work, the Taiwan, lives and works in Taipei island is used as a stage. Employ- ing the cinematographic device of the “green screen”—a generic background that is replaced in the post-production process with any other background image —Hsu places a fictional version of the original tiny temple on the island. Slowly, the camera zooms out and reveals that it is a montage, now showing the green screen on the island. This scenography forms the backdrop of a performance Hsu Chia-Wei, Marshal Tie Jia, 2012, HD video, colour, sound; temple in which a local senior citizen sings scene installations, photograph, film: approx. 10 min; installation: a form of folk opera found only 240 × 240 × 280 cm; photograph: 120 × 120 cm 88 � 28 89 Yin-Ju Chen One Universe, One Nation, of closure and despair in the face of One God, 2012 the inescapable cycles of history. The Turner Archives, 2011 The particular moment evoked (in collaboration with James T. here is the age of space explora- Hong) tion in the 1960s, juxtaposed with the forms of imperial, ideological, Yin-Ju Chen presents two works and totalitarian power existing in the Taipei Biennial 2012: The at that time. The inspiration for the Turner Archives, created together work came from Hannah Arendt’s with James T. Hong, and a new analysis of space exploration as a three-screen video called One form of “world alienation,” and also Universe, One God, One Nation. from the astrological horoscope The Turner Archives is inspired of Chang Kai-Shek, which predicts by the infamous novel The Turner his charismatic and authoritarian Diaries, written by William Luther character. How is it that most Pierce. The Turner Diaries has modern movements for a better been called a “bible of racism,” as future, and all attempts to break it sets out scenarios of race war free from the chains of power, and ends with the victory of white ultimately fall prey to their own supremacy. It is famous for having mythologies? Here we enter the been the inspiration for numerous slippery ground between “science” racist crimes and right-wing terror- and “collective dream image,” ist attacks. The installation The between the knowledge and the Turner Archives creates a fictional fantasy of an epoch. One Universe, character named Turner, whose One God, One Nation is a visual private “war room” or planning meditation on power, modern office we enter. Here we find his forms of totality and totalitarianism, personal plans to overthrow the US mass mobilization, devotion, the government as well as references auratic, and the supernatural. to recent anti-immigration laws It works through the juxtaposition passed in the US and to the history of images taken in outer space of the Ku-Klux Klan. There are two with images of war and submission videos in the war room, one show- to power. ing images of segregation archi- tecture and the US-Mexico border, Yin-Ju Chen, born 1977 in and the other showing images of Taiwan, lives and works in Taipei the multi-ethnic America against which Turner directs his war. Yin-Ju Chen’s new video instal- Yin-Ju Chen, One Universe, One Nation, One God, 2012, 3-channel HD lation One Universe, One God, video installation, colour, sound, 17 min; Yin-James T. Hong, The Turner One Nation seeks to evoke a sense Archives, 2011, multimedia installation 90 � 29 91 Pratchaya Phinthong One of Them (01), 2012 of the seismograph was never unveiled and remained a mystery Pratchaya Phinthong’s works for the many scientists that pro- deal with global economic value duced replicas that never reached exchange and its material manifes- the same accuracy. tation. In a recent project he joined Pratchaya Phinthong links this Thai workers to pick berries in object with a current economic Sweden when he was invited for a reality. Globally, 17 rare earth residency in France. He asked the minerals (REES) necessary for curator in France to add on a daily hi-tech gadgets such as flat screen basis useless material to the exhi- TVs, smartphones and hybrid bition of the same weight as the cars are being sourced. With the weight of the berries that he picked closing of the last US element mine that day. In another project he in 2002, the People’s Republic presented a stack of Zimbabwean of China is now close to having a dollars, a stack that grew as euros global monopoly on these minerals, were slowly being exchanged controlling 97% of the global trade. through a local network since the Recently, China announced to Zimbabwean dollar’s hyperinflation be cutting the exports by 70%. is so strong that it is banned from The ball in the exhibition is part international exchange markets. of a set of eight balls, all produced The geographic focus in One in China, each one cast in one of Them (01) is on the People’s of the earth minerals. The ball is Republic of China. In ancient placed in the direction pointing China, the scientist Zhang Heng to mainland China. was said to have invented a seis- mograph that worked with extreme Pratchaya Phinthong, born precision to detect the occurrence 1974 in Thailand, lives and of an earthquake as well as works in Bangkok the direction of its source. On the outside of a closed vessel eight dragons were attached, each fac- ing the principle directions of the compass, and each carrying a ball in their mouth. When the ground moved, the ball in the mouth of the dragon facing the direction of the earthquake source would move and fall into the mouth of a toad Pratchaya Phinthong, One of Them (01), 2012, a ball made of rare earth that was seated with open mouth mineral (Ytterbium Metal), 10 cm diameter, colour print on paper, under the dragon. The mechanism 42 × 29.7 cm. Courtesy of gb agency, Paris 92 30 93 Wei-Li Yeh With Chi-Pan Chen, Yu-Hsin Wu, Jhi-Yi Liu, Pei-Chun Shih, Gang Yen, Chi-Min Tsai, Chun-Ta Chiu, Freya Chou, Daisy Li, Chih-Ming Feng, Leo Wang, Ku-Ming Chen and Chi-An Tsai

Antiquity-Like Rubbish in commodity capitalism, or the Research & Development quasi-magical production of Syndicate in 206, 2010 – “value” in art. present Each of these three categories delineates a class of objects Every object assumes a name, beyond utility. “Trash” designates a place, a value, and utilitarian objects that have become value- or symbolic meaning. Much of a less. Objects here literally “fall society‘s labor is spent keeping apart” and become “impure” and objects and their classifications “undifferentiated,” that is, without pure and stable (above all, in the clear borders—hence the affinity name of safety or cultural values). of trash with monstrosity. It is But before, underneath, and after in this realm of hybridity that the this order, there is plenty of uncer- project finds its materials: objects tainty and impurity. Antiquity-Like salvaged during spatial reno- Rubbish Research & Development vation projects, objects from illegal Syndicate, led by artist Yeh Wei-Li roadside dumping grounds, since 2010, is dedicated to this neighborhood construction uncertainty and to the movement sites, beaches, and riverbeds. Can of things across boundaries. such discarded debris be “elevated” This process-oriented work and achieve the status of either began in 2010 with a concrete “antiquity” or “art” through analysis, spatial renovation project in which evaluation, and aesthetic judgment? fourteen artists collaborated, and Can it simultaneously challenge has since materialized in different the hierarchy between trash and temporary collaborations involving art—its connection, for instance, various forms of production, to the classifying and evaluating reflection, and media. The project institutions of the museum, maps the processes and move- the market, or individual author- ments among the categories of ship, and its disconnection from everyday collective practice, The precarious balance between these categories functions like a map that registers “transformation” Wei-Li Yeh, born 1971 in in the order of society, whether this Taiwan, lives and works in Taipei Wei-Li Yeh, Antiquity-Like Rubbish Research & Development Syndicate be devaluation and destruction in in Miaoli, 2012, from stage right-center to left-center, wooden light-box, urban renewal, or value-production Lamba semi-transperency, 100 × 200 × 15 cm 94 � 31 95 Peter Friedl Bilbao Song, 2010 Receiving the Ambassador of Spain (1817) by Jean-Auguste- Peter Friedl’s works assume the Dominique Ingres, most of the character of “conceptual acts” painters and their motifs are lesser and “models,” with the purpose known, and suggest that what of exposing particular problems is at stake here is the creation of of representation at the intersec- a counter-iconographic memory tion between aesthetics and within a frame dominated by politics. They are models of images of the “terrorism” that narration in which the “official” defined the Basque struggle version of history-telling—and thus for independence. In this multi- representation—breaks down. layered allegory, there are also Friedl emphasizes the gaps and real people—such as the clowns inadequacies that characterize the Pirritx and Porrotx, who entertain relation between representation and educate children in the Basque and history. language, Euskara. The music In Bilbao Song, Friedl uses track—the only “live” action on the genre of the Tableaux vivants stage—is an instrumental version to create a complex allegory. of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Tableaux vivants were originally Der Bilbao Song. This song used to popularize famous paint- has nothing to do with Bilbao, the ings, to bring these paintings capital of the Basque Country, but as re-staged life-scenes to people is rather set in the gangster milieu who had no access to the original. of Chicago. Not unlike Brecht’s Bilbao Song shows different universe, what is at stake here historical paintings from various is a history populated by marginal epochs as tableaux vivants. What (or subaltern) figures who reveal they have in common is that they the surreal construction and are all related to the Basque Coun- fictional character of historiography. try, a part of Spain marked by its struggle for independence, whose Peter Friedl, born 1960 in complex history encompasses Austria, lives and works in Berlin the internal colonization of Europe, the so-called “minority-question,” as well as the world’s first aerial bombing of civilians, famously depicted by Picasso in his painting Guernica—an iconic picture of both modern atrocity and modernist art. Aside from the first scene Peter Friedl, Bilbao Song, 2010, HD video, colour, sound, 5 min 53 sec. depicting the painting Henry IV Courtesy of Meyer Kainer Gallery, Vienna 96 � 32 97 Roee Rosen Maxim Komar-Myshkin, him dead. The album Vladimir’s Vladimir’s Night, 2011 – 2012 Night is hence an act of personal Out, 2010 revenge, which calls upon the aesthetics of Soviet children books Roee Rosen is a painter, filmmaker, for aid. and writer whose work interrogates Roee Rosen’s other work in the structures of power, trauma, and exhibition is the video Out (Tse). evil. His often grotesque, macabre, It is both a documentary and exor- and obscene works evoke a sense cistic horror film. The film alludes of realism in the face of the struc- to the European-Christian tradition tural violence of a world where of exorcism rituals, whereby victims turn perpetrators and terror a demon or devil is driven out bears the name of the rule of law. of the body of a possessed In Vladimir’s Night, Vladimir person. In Out, two people from Putin is shown vacationing in his the Israeli BDSM (bondage and summer mansion—in the role of discipline / sadomasochism) a little child. Before falling asleep scene agree to hold a role-playing he imagines seeing faces in the session in which the spirit of wooden veneer of his bedroom extreme right-wing Israeli foreign cabinet. Animated objects flow minister Avigdor Lieberman is exor- out to cuddle with Vladimir, but the cised, using as text original quotes scene soon turns violent. Vladimir by Lieberman. Out is a piece on is gradually raped, tortured, and domination, submission, and the murdered by objects. acting out of power structures. The author of these paintings But above all, it is an anatomy of and poems, Russian artist Efim borderline-disorders—the projec- Poplavsky (1978–2011)—aka tion of one’s own fears onto others Maxim Komar-Myshkin—is one that marks the structural core among several fictional figures of xenophobia and racism. created by Roee Rosen. He was allegedly influenced by Soviet Roee Rosen, born 1963 author Daniil Kharms’s funny and in Israel, lives and works in horrifying sense of the absurd, Tel Aviv-Yafo embodying both a defiant autono- my through art and the realism of terror. Poplavsky, who allegedly committed suicide last year, is described by Rosen as a Jewish emigrant to Israel from Russia who suffered from severe paranoia, Roee Rosen, Maxim Komar-Myshkin, Vladimir’s Night (detail), 2011–2012, believing that Putin himself wanted series of 36 gouaches on paper, each 55 × 33.5 cm 98 � 33 99 Jimmie Durham The Museum of Stones, 2012 mechanical “nature,” as opposed Smashing, 2004 to “subject” and “culture.” And stone also stands for permanence; Jimmie Durham is a sculptor and it is the material into which Western poet whose work can be described culture inscribes its fantasies of as a disarming mirror, a sarcasti- eternity, representation, and power. cally sharp yet playful critique of For Jimmie Durham, these have both Western colonial rationality become the source not of “reason” and universal stupidity. A disarming but of fanatic and willful “belief” mirror: as a Native American artist and the mass deception prevalent and activist, Durham reverses the in Western modernity. Hence stereotypical imputations projected The Museum of Stones includes onto and used to categorize the a quote and sketch by Adolf Hitler native and “primitive.” He unmasks that speaks of stone as the only the ignorance and stupidity in self- thing that “withstands the flux proclaimed “modern” systems of of all phenomena.” Durham’s own knowledge and their alleged supe- conception of stone is rather differ- rior rationality by applying the very ent: he sees in stone an agent that same methods used to categorize, not only inhabits a different time, historicize, and musealize cultures but is also an image of permanent of the “other” to the tradition of geological transformation. the West and Modern Science. The video Smashing equally This reversal produces insights engages with stone—here it is that empower counter-hegemonic used as a tool to destroy various narratives—narratives opposed, objects given to Durham as he sits for instance, to the predominant behind a desk offering his service. view of progress and evolution— Decomposition, destruction, trash: letting us grasp instead a history it is through those “objects” that of actual destruction, a story of have fallen outside the “order regression and decay, which has of things” that Durham’s work tells its backdrop in modernity’s geno- us what this order doesn’t know cidal continuity which began about itself. with the conquest of the Americas and lasts up to today. Jimmie Durham, born 1940 in In his The Museum of Stones, USA, lives and works in Berlin Durham plays the classifying and Rome scientist that juxtaposes Western ideas and practices surrounding stones with this own. Stone, in the Jimmie Durham, The Museum of Stones (detail), 2012, mixed media western tradition, is the “object” installation. Photo: Arwed Messmer that is “pure, dead matter” and Jimmie Durham, Smashing, 2004, video, colour, sound, 92 min 100 � 34 101 Andrea Geyer Spiral Lands / Chapter 2, 2008 Every summer hundreds of anthropologists, ethnographers, In the cycle of works called Spiral artists, and photographers travel Lands, Andrea Geyer investigates to the Southwest to conduct their the role of photography in the investigations into the land and colonization and continuous appro- local culture. Looking closer at the priation of the North American outcome of such investigations, continent, using the American one could say that in these writ- Southwest (now Arizona, New ings of histories and identities, it Mexico, Utah, and Colorado) as is not their subjects but rather the an example. Not stopping with researchers / ethnographers them- the past, but working up through selves, who—like the protagonist the present moment, Geyer looks in fiction—hold center stage. critically at records, documents, In Geyer’s installation the lecturer stories, drawings, and photography in the voice-over is critically asking that construct the complex history herself what drives the desire for of North America and the identity this land and what enables the feel- of its people. Taking the context ing of a right of passage. of the Navajo Nation and the surrounding Pueblos (the American Andrea Geyer, born 1971 in Southwest) as an example, the Germany, lives and works in project works itself non-linearly New York through different aspects of the historic encounters of first Europe- an settlers, then Euro-Americans, with this land and its people. Addressing the Western concept of “landscape,” Geyer points to the fact that visualization is and has always been a sophisticated ideo- logical device, revealing as much of what stands behind the camera as what stands in front. Chapter 2 of Spiral Lands consists of a slide projection with the voice-over of a lecture. This form engages the role of “the scholar” or “the researcher,” Andrea Geyer, Spiral Lands / Chapter 2, 2008, installation in an who for 150 years has fostered educational setting with slide projection, 80 colour and b/w slides, an ongoing fascination with this voice over, brochure with footnotes, 50 min. Courtesy of Galerie particular part of North America. Thomas Zander, Cologne 102 � 35 103 The Otolith Group Anathema, 2011 acting as sentient entities in labora- Daughter Products tory tests, Anathema takes us into (1952–1962), 2011 the interior of the world of dream- factory capitalism as seen through The name of The Otolith Group the “eyes” of liquid crystals. The (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun) film becomes a “space odyssey” is derived from the organ-structure of sorts, a slow and epic journey in our inner ear through which into the heart of digital technology keep balance and derive our and its pixel-world of machine- sense of gravity and orientation. assemblages. The film is described Much of The Otolith Group’s work, by the artists as a counter-spell materializing in different media, is to the prevalent contemporary form engaged in critical historiographies of “capitalist sorcery.” of colonialism, contemporary Daughter Products (2011) is capitalism, and their related social a suite of archival images belong- imaginaries. ing to Anasuya Gyan Chand, Our capacity to rethink criti- the former president of the National cally our quotidian worlds lies Federation of Indian Women. in our ability to reverse and inverse In these photographs we see Indian everyday perceptions and pers- stateswomen and delegations pectives. Such a gesture of inver- on official visits to the USSR, sion is what the video Anathema Japan, and Chairman Mao’s China. suggests. What if it is not we who These are images from the largely control and own the “black mirror,” perished world of socialist interna- those digital touch screens that tionalism and solidarity, and look- have become identical with the ing at them today raises questions world of communicative capitalism, not only of political, but also of and which today keep us under historical economy and the trans- their spell? What if it is the formations of horizons of political substance in these screens that and collective aspirations. actually “owns” us, making us a vehicle of its desires and needs, The Otolith Group, invading our nervous system and founded in London in 2002 our affects and emotions? Liquid crystals, the substance of which LCD screens are made, are indeed a peculiar sort of material, situated somewhere between the inorganic and the organic, between life and non-life. Beginning with the micro- The Otolith Group, Daughter Products (1952–1962) (detail), 2011, scopic behavior of liquid crystals series of 56 silver gelatin prints, dimensions variable 104 � 36 105 Omer Fast 5000 Feet is the Best, 2011 only minor changes that are hardly visible, like flashbacks. After tell- Omer Fast’s work shifts strategi- ing two stories involving tricksters cally between documentary and and make-believe, the ex-pilot fictional registers in ways that ulti- tells a more detailed story about mately destabilize our understand- a family that is bombed and killed. ing of reality and media. Many This narrative resembles one of his recent works have engaged the real ex-pilot tells about a bomb- with the US wars in Iraq and ing in Afghanistan, but with one Afghanistan and the role of media, major difference: the people are technology, and subjectivity. The not bombed in Afghanistan, but in video 5000 Feet is the Best is built the United States, and by Chinese from two simultaneous story lines. occupying forces. One consists of footage of inter- views that he conducted at the end Omer Fast, born 1972 in Israel, of 2010 with an American ex-drone lives and works in Berlin pilot who talks about the work he did for five years that left him with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The identity of the speaker is concealed in this interview. The second story line consists of a fictional interview with an ex-drone pilot in a hotel room in Las Vegas, where he now is a security guard at a casino. In the first interview, the ex-pilot talks calmly and practically about his job: hitting targets, and human factors like fatigue due to overwork. At certain points the interview shifts to a more emotional tone and the ex-pilot shares how he felt when he killed someone for the first time. The atmosphere in the second interview is very different. The ex-pilot is irritated and answers in a hasty, indifferent manner. One passage of the interview is played Omer Fast, 5000 Feet is the Best, 2011, HD video, colour, sound, 30 min. over and over again, incorporating Courtesy of gb agency, Paris; Arratia Beer, Berlin 106 � 37 107 Luis Jacob Album II, 2003–2004 In his series of Albums, Jacob collects images from print media Luis Jacob is committed to opening that revolve around themes up “framed” situations from within. such as design and inhabitation, Jacob activates spaces, relations, architecture and networks, genres, identities, and stereotypes and in the case of the ninety-part to make them realize their potential Album II, the body and social and possibilities. And he reflects interaction. These images are structurally and historically on grouped together and laminated both “the opening” as an event in a serial montage that forms in which everyday certainties, an abstract narrative, variously social constructions, and ontological through content- or form-based grounds are disrupted, and correspondences, which articulate historical processes of closure the associations and projections within the horizons of our collec- of its viewers. The Albums send tive imaginaries: the affirmation us on a journey into the “image- of a particular order, the reification space,” full of repetitions, rhythm, of identity, the consolidation of ruptures, semantic shifts, and power and authority. fragile constellations in which Against the backdrop of his no determinate meaning can ever philosophical training, Jacob’s artis- evolve. It is this intentional confron- tic work can be characterized as tation of the space of meaning “theory-without-text.” Like theory, it (and of “transcendent” language distills from the concrete, singular, and rationality) kept in conscious and particular the “general type,” unstable movement with the a “formal law,” a structure, logic, or space of imminence, of gesture rationale. But like poetry—or all art and bodily, emotional knowledge, for that matter—it uses the singular through which we can experience and particular as an event that form not as something stable, disrupts such abstract structures but rather as dialogic event in from within, insisting on non-identity which it is also us being formed. and difference as the location of all events and encounters, and equally Luis Jacob, born 1971 in Peru, insisting that nothing in this world lives and works in Toronto can ever be fully assimilated into any structure or generality: there always remains an incommensu- rable rest, a gap, a possible locus of resistance, and this locus must be recovered from the relational Luis Jacob, Album II (detail, panels # 8, 9, 10), 2003–2004, image reality of feelings and affects. montage in plastic laminate, 80 panels, each 45.7 × 30.5 cm 108 � 38 Museum of Rhythm Curated by Natasha Ginwala Participating Artists: Erick Beltrán, Francisco Camacho, Hanne Darboven, Juan Downey, Simone Forti, Frank B. Gilbreth, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Channa Horwitz, Ken Jacobs, Katarzyna Kobro, Labour Exchange Band, Richard Lin, Jean Painlevé, Gerhard Rühm, Tomo Savić-Gecan, Yashas Shetty and others

Are there not alternatives to when the vibrating tuning fork memory and forgetting: periods permeates its skin. where the past returns – and peri- Surrounded by political, cultur- ods where the past effaces itself? al and civilizational collapses on a Perhaps such an alternative would global scale, we are now faced with be the rhythm of history… the sheer facticity that there is – Henri Lefebvre1 no stable ground upon which history can be sighted. Only a lingering 1 The official accounts we accept identification with its memorized as situated pasts have been tempo endures. Within a seismic composed at a certain pitch, tempo contemporaneity, the imaginative and frequency. When arranged as potential of telling time may no a linear progression, history comes longer lie in minor dissections of to be “heard” as a brutal drone. petrified chronicles, but in recon- Just as the striking of a tuning fork sidering the entirety of its sensual releases a swarm of collisions that complex—the rhythm of history. are only received as a steady hum The terrains of rhythm have by the human ear, the construc- historically maintained an ontologi- tion of Modernity has involved a cal unfixity that allows anti-time systemic muting of imprints that forms to defy schemes of narrative run alongside proclaimed univer- regimentation. Rhythm is said sals. Even the vector of modern to taxonomize time, yet its inherent monstrosity has been made impen- capability extends to facilitate a etrable—a medley of masks that shuttling across “times” as delays, can no longer reveal a face. The repetitions, and overlays. Hence, effects of this positivist temporality the figurative demands of rhythm resonate as a false note unto which urge us towards inhabiting history we are made shadow dancers. The rather than simply becoming articulations of parallel collisions transcribed subjects of it—as as possible worlds, hence, call for a Bakhtinian 2 swallowing of “the new frameworks of transgression, world” in order to compel histories whose shattering effect is akin to to speak from the gut, as an uncan- 2 the breaking of a water horizon ny polyphony of “self-worlds”. 111 The complex lineage of “trans- “Sonakinatography drawings” of gressions” in so-called primitive Channa Horwitz, and much else, to societies has amounted to the build fictive bridges as well as vital subversive overturning of modern frictions between aesthetic propos- consciousness and continues to als, material histories and scientific be cast as a fundamental opposite documents. to civilizational progress. To map the As a potential knowledge field, social texture of nonconformity from rhythmanalysis has been refer- an inside of the present, we may enced in philosophy, literature and turn to rhythmic dispositions the social sciences, yet remained and radical empathy between marginal within investigations of things of incommensurate worlds. historical time. Here, acts of rhyth- We thereby also address silent mological study are carried out thresholds between cultures of within a museal frame to re-read colonization and supposed states volatile aspects of temporality — its of aberration. abrasions, interstices, accidental Museum of Rhythm sets forth coherences and reversals. Depart- 3 a gestural itinerary, which includes ing from the notion of historical the early life of metronomes, a museums as sites of accumulation, dog whistle, a satellite image of Museum of Rhythm is conceived “White Lines in The Gobi Desert”, as an architecture of transmissions Parisian street calls, the invention where the viewer is an auratic of a swimming stroke, Frank B. device and the museum, an affec- Gilbreth’s motion studies, an indig- tive membrane. (Natasha Ginwala) enous song tradition composed to radio static, Simone Forti dancing 1. Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanaly- the news, a Laurel and Hardy clas- sis: Space, time and everyday sic set to a “nervous” throbbing 3, life, Continuum, 2004. Theosophist aura diagrams, Hanne 2. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and Darboven’s encryptions of deep His World, Indiana University self-time, an aural archive that Press, 2009. surveys the politics of listening, 3. A reference to Ken Jacobs’ nineteenth century photographs of Nervous Magic Lantern an indigo factory in colonial India,

1 Ken Jacobs, Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy: Bye, Molly, 2005, b&w, colour, sound, 90 min 2 Yashas Shetty, Notes from Utopia, 2011–present, Image: Rita Willeart 3 Frank B. Gilbreth, Motion Study Photographs (1913 – 1917), from image verso: “Champion of Germany fencing. The lights are on the hilt and on the point of the rapier.” Berlin, Jan. 27, 1914. Courtesy of Kheel Center, Cornell University 4 Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2010– present, ‘Voice-prints’ showing the frequency 4 and amplitude of two different voices saying the word “you”. Courtesy of the Aural Contract Audio Archive 112 � 39 113 Marysia Lewandowska Neil Cummings Museum Futures: ized and professionalized by institu- Distributed, 2008 tions. They allude to an exchange set in 2058 between the future Museums used to be like mauso- director of Moderna Museet and leums, places in which objects, a young researcher. Their conversa- artifacts, and works of art were tion recounts the various adapta- classified and preserved from tions that museums have undergone decay. This mission of preservation in the “past,” for instance, after has made museums the antithesis the market for objects of art as of “life,” since life is in permanent “commodities” collapsed. It envi- transformation, and museums were sions the near future of the museum, conceived as places outside the which has already become a global- normal flow of time. ized, dynamic structure that Contrary to this concept, the constantly re-evaluates and modi- Moderna Museet, established 1958 fies itself along permanent feedback in Stockholm, is an emblematic processes, embedded in and collab- “modern” museum, seeking to be orating with the market economy in actively engaged in envisioning new forms. In the future envisioned societal futures rather than merely here, contemporary art—as a social presenting a mummified past. It is practice plays a widely recognized in institutions like Modern Museet role, but one cannot help but that the call for transparency and wonder, given the overtly “profes- participation, which has gained criti- sionalized” character of the conver- cal momentum in public discourse sation, if this role consists more in around museums, originates. It is supporting and ultimately managing now an almost universally accepted the capitalist resource of creativity, demand: museums should be in a time when dynamized, quasi- platforms for participation and corporate institutions have penetrat- exchange. One consequence of this ed all aspects of life. The ambiva- effort has been the popular move lence between utopian projection away from art primarily understood and critique characterizes this as object or artifact and towards vision of the future role of museums an understanding of art as a social in society. process. In the sci-fi-like film Museum Marysia Lewandowska, born Futures: Distributed, Marysia 1955 in Poland, lives and works Lewandowska and Neil Cummings in London; Neil Cummings, speculate what will happen once born 1947 in UK, lives and works Marysia Lewandowska, Neil Cummings, Museum Futures: Distributed, 2008, this demand has been fully internal- in London HD video, colour, sound, 32 min. Courtesy of Moderna Museet Collection 114 � 40 115 Eric Baudelaire The Anabasis of May and of Tokyo and Beirut are blended Fusako Shigenobu, Masao in with archival footage, TV clips Adachi and 27 Years and film excerpts as backdrop for without Images, 2011 May and Adachi’s voices and memories. They speak of everyday Who are May and Fusako life, of being a little girl in hiding, Shigenobu? Fusako—leader of of exile, politics and cinema, an extremist left-wing faction, the and their fascinating overlap. All of Japanese Red Army, involved in which adds up not so much to an a number of terrorist operations– enquiry as a fragmented anamnesis. has been hiding in Beirut for almost (Jean-Pierre Rehm) 30 years. May, her daughter, born in Lebanon, only discovered Eric Baudelaire, born 1973 in Japan at the age of twenty-seven, USA, lives and works in Paris after her mother’s arrest in 2000. And Masao Adachi? A screenwriter and radical activist filmmaker, committed to armed struggle and the Palestinian cause, was also underground in Lebanon for several decades before being sent back to his native country. In his years as a film director, he had been one of the instigators of a “theory of landscape”—fukeiron: through filming landscapes, Adachi sought to reveal the structures of oppres- sion that underpin and perpetuate the political system. Anabasis? The name given, since Xenophon, to wandering, circuitous homeward journeys. It is this complicated, dark, and always suspenseful story that Eric Baudelaire—an artist renowned for using photography as a means of questioning the staging of reality— chose to bring forth using the Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao documentary format. Filmed on Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, 2011, Super 8 film transferred to Super 8 mm, and in the manner of HD video, colour, sound; 9 silkscreen posters; printed libretto, film: 66 fukeiron, contemporary panoramas min; posters: each 120 × 80 cm 116 � 41 117 Chia-En Jao Arms, 2012 arms rises above the South Pacific Islands, and the (broken) shape The word “symbol” has its roots of Taiwan’s Yushan mountain in the Greek symbolon, which is visible. Portions of the triangle originally meant to throw, or bind, are filled in with galvanized steel something together. Can we look plates, which are commonly used at history as symbolic in this sense, to build factories in Taiwan. Above as a synthesis and violent amal- the red sun is an American military gamation of events and disparate helmet, representing US hegemony influences, which together form the in Taiwan under the KMT, after image and imagination of the Japan’s defeat. On top of the present and the past? The symbol- helmet are feathers of a Taiwanese ic, used in this sense of “binding Mikado pheasant, while in the together,” stands for power, for background there is an unidenti- domination, and for the subjugation fied inferno against the backdrop of disparate peoples and elements of black eagle wings, the iconic under a single rule. The symbols imperial symbol. In the center of known as “coats of arms” are such the image is an upright cannon symbols par excellence. in which a sugar cane grows—the The piece Arms by Chia-En very first commodity cultivated Jao is about the making of in Taiwan, which aroused imperial both symbols and Taiwanese interest and led to the waves of history. Employing the symbolic colonization that have defined language—the “genre” —typi- Taiwanese history—and continue cally used on such emblems, he to define it today. designed thirty coats of arms. Each coat of arms is composed of Chia-En Jao, born 1976 in a multitude of elements that have Taiwan, lives and works in Taipei come to signify events, materi- als, or structures that are deeply ingrained into the history and cultural memory of Taiwan. The coat of arms pictured here shows the rising sun, representing the imperial Japanese dream of “uniting” Asia. In the late nine- teenth century, Japan took posses- sion of Taiwan from the defeated Qing Dynasty, which had ruled the island since the seventeenth Chia-En Jao, Arms (detail), 2012, pencil on paper, series of 30 drawings, century. The sun on the coat of each 40 × 40 cm 118 � 42 119 Boris Ondreička Black Birds & Ondreicˇka work. Both language— Blackbirds (II), 2012 spoken text or written words—and images—concrete or abstract— Boris Ondreicˇka is a singer, author, here become sensors of sorts curator and artist whose works for what Ondreicˇka simply calls deal predominantly with language, “frequencies,” which is something both in its spoken form as we may experience as viewers performed poetry, and in writing, in the rhythm of our associations with a particular focus on typog- and emotional reactions, but raphy. His work never assumes which also is a way of “recording” a final form or materializes in history—a history quite different objects; rather, it constitutes itself from linear time, but no less actual, as a permanent process, based embodied, and sensual. Hence, on a pool of “materials” which are DNA as the physical “code of life” assembled and recombined in site- is a persistent motif in Ondreička’s and context-specific interventions. work—and the spiraling double Aside from text—mostly his own helix is perhaps an image par writings—his work encompasses excellence for the willful collapse a vast and ever-changing collec- of dialectics, for folding opposites tion of images, appropriated from into each other along a certain various sources and different “frequency.” And it is also an image historical epochs. It is in the space for scientific laws and determina- between text and image that his tion, as the code or program from work temporarily nests. This is which emerges all living forms. the space of the imagination, or Ondreicˇka’s performance in other words, of morphological and installation Black Birds and figuration, in which the differences Blackbirds for the Taipei Biennial between form and image, image investigates the “dark” side of all and meaning, become porous and form and meaning—the unknown, unstable. These differences can the realm of the hallucinatory, be blurred or enhanced through irrational, or compulsive—and the the strategic use of semantic shifts pure “imminence” of form, that and displacements, that is, through is, the point where the difference the conceptual act of poetry. The between form and mental process inconsistencies of meaning and or social relation evaporates, rationality are embraced by music where “reading” and “immersion” and rhythm. It is this immersive, become one and the same. associative, and even hallucinatory quality unleashed in language Boris Ondreicˇka, born 1969 and images through their musical in Slovakia, lives and works in activation that is at the core of Bratislava Boris Ondreicˇka, Minajority, 2012, media and dimensions variable 120 � 43 121 Virlani Hallberg O, 2012 experienced in mental despair Receding Triangular and psychological illness, but also Square, 2012 on a historical scale through the long-lasting destruction of culture O, a three channel video instal- under colonial subjugation. The lation, revisits the old European work juxtaposes traditional healing literary genre of the “bourgeois methods from Taiwan’s aboriginal portrait” and insists on its ghostly cultures, as well as Daoist rituals, actuality as a diagram of both with Western-style psychiatry. intimate and historical relations. Rituals as well as psychiatric treat- Situated in Sweden, it tells of a love ment are different ways of “undo- triangle involving a young, wealthy, ing detachment” and “repairing the newly wed couple and their female web of time that has been broken” domestic worker of color, with (Chris Marker in Sans Soleil). whom they share everyday life on RTS investigates different ways of their estate. The idyllic image and crossing boundaries to the “other the particular social order repre- side”—the side of re-connection, sented here comes at the price of where broken relations and detach- frequent outbursts of psychological ments can be restored. This “other and physical violence, and the side” is the side of the psyche, of routines performed gradually unspeakable experiences, or the reveal themselves as a normative side of the ancestors and “spir- “script” full of implicit agreements its”—but our connection to this in which the characters mutually side is no longer taken for granted. objectify each other, thus entrap- It has to be questioned, made or ping each other in psychological re-made. The work reflects on this double binds. In this constellation, making and unmaking. the female domestic worker is both an object of violence and a projec- Virlani Hallberg, born 1981 tion surface for the white woman’s in Indonesia, lives and works desires. O is a work about the in Berlin and Stockholm place of intimacy and desire within a setting of structural violence, and the resulting dependencies and ambivalences in the relation between victims and perpetrators. Receding Triangular Square is a new work created in collaboration with the psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Leon Tan. It explores forms Virlani Hallberg, O, 2012, 3-channel HD video installation, colour, of detachment and alienation as sound, 30 min 122 � 44 The Museum of Gourd Curated by Chihiro Minato Participating Artists: Chen Szuting, Ting-Ya Chang, Daizaburo Harada, Kung Yi-Fang, Hsu Ming-Sheng, Shiro Takahashi

The gourd has been used as a “Stone Age” is, I think, a particularly container across the world since modern vision with a very limited ancient times. Grown in Africa, perspective, because we do not Eurasia, Austronesia, and America know whether stone was actually for more than ten thousand years, the primary tool of this era. There it is one of the world’s oldest must have been many more tools cultivated plants. Easy to grow that were more important. and cut, it was sometimes used For this reason, I would prefer as a dish, spoon, or a container to call it the “Gourd Age.” Migration for water and wine. In China and over land and water would not 1 Japan, the seeds kept in the gourd have been possible without a water were believed to be fertile, just container. If the amazing diversity as the gourd is itself a symbol of of the gourd family is the result of fertility and fluidity. In the Chinese human migration, then the gourd myth of Genesis, it is said that is one of those things that have a man and woman survived the sustained our long life on this Great Flood by using a large gourd planet while leaving very little trace as a boat. In eastern Taiwan there of itself. We have shaped gourds are villages where local shamans and have been shaped by them. use the gourd bottle for divination. We are literally the children of the The first form of the Chinese gourd. ideogram for the gourd is found On the question of containers, today in the word for “liberty”—for it is also interesting to reconsider there is no liberty without fluidity the “Atomic Age” after the great and, it seems, no fluidity without earthquake in Japan. the gourd. The Fukushima nuclear Another use of the gourd, disaster revealed not only the limit which may be as old as that of of our capacity to control nuclear the container, is as a musical energy but also its paradox: while instrument. Its natural shape is the reactor generates immense an ideal resonator and has been energy, this energy must be totally used to make rattles, whistles, contained. The reactor liberates and many kinds of drums. Ancient the energy without fluidity, since history is often conceived in terms fluidity would release dangerous 2 of such things as stone tools. The radioactivity. 125 The vast contamination and history of the gourd will be traced planet-wide pollution following the through mythology, literature, Fukushima disaster illustrate this drawing, and photography. The paradox. The gourd could be a Taiwanese artist Chang Ting-Ya model for the low-tech culture that will draw the history through will follow high-tech disasters. We her inside-outside vision. Shiro have begun to turn our attention to Takahashi will make a “Big Gourd” alternative sources of energy from with his BABOT technology, to wind and from water—resources symbolize the fluidity and liberty that flow freely. If the phenomenon of our time. Daizaburo Harada, of life is in fact this very flow, then a leading Japanese computer the gourd is one of the oldest graphic artist, will visualize models of fluidity. The Hawaiian the form of container-contents gourd, for example, symbolizes architecture. ocean winds and is also used as In addition, Gourd Magazine 3 a musical instrument for Hawaiian will be an online magazine dance. published by The Museum of We would like to offer this Gourd. It will cover a wide range mini-museum as a container of topics such as art, design, for (thinking) fluidity and liberty. architecture, and more. Many The Museum of Gourd is a living will be invited to share their gourd museum that collects, keeps, and stories, which will be archived in exchanges ideas about containers the museum. and the contents of our societies Finally, the Gourd Shop and minds. Some cities have will sell original products that their psycho-geographical form symbolize our philosophy of incorporated into their historical fluidity. (Chihiro Minato) setting—Taipei being one of these cities. In Shilin, the northwestern part of the city, there was once an island called Gourd Island, and we still find its form and its name on one of the streets. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum is located at the mouth of the ancient Gourd Island. The Museum of Gourd will be composed of a number of sections. One will display the first edition of the Gourd Collection. The world

1 Kung Yi-Fang, Medium-sized gourds 4 2, 3 Chihiro Minato, Gourd drawings 4 Ting-Ya Chang, Cure, Gourd border No.5, 2012, Woodcut, 90 × 90 cm舫 126 � 45 127 Jason Dodge The Ornithologists Are of the ornithologists and children Sleeping, 2012 are missing, as the pillows are The Children Are put in the original sleeping posi- Sleeping, 2011 tion. These works engage in a Alto Flute Filled With well-defined intimacy, as they are Deadly Nightshade, 2009 juxtaposed with the piece Anyone. Anyone, 2010 While the pillows of the former work were shipped to Taipei by the The works of Jason Dodge function artist, who knows well who slept as material witnesses for actions on them, Anyone consists of a pile that belong to the realm of the of bed sheets from a hotel in Taipei imaginary and are presented which have been slept on numer- in space in the form of an absence. ous times and continue to be slept The sparse objects operate as on and changed weekly. poetry and form a screen that In Alto Flute Filled With Deadly is necessarily filled with a narra- Nightshade, this negotiation of a tive. The titles give away what borderline is situated in the status happened to the works before they of the object itself. The flute is were placed in the exhibition which forcefully silenced and creates a gives them the appearance of present vacuum, as its status shifts “objets trouvés”, but with the under- from being an object that is used to standing that the object’s qualities being an object that gets a life of its were meant to be. This way of own and becomes a beautiful threat looking crosses the geographic and to anyone interested in playing it. temporal, to include other places and times, and sometimes other Jason Dodge, born 1969 in senses other than sight alone. USA, lives and works in Berlin The Ornithologists Are Sleep- ing consists of pillows that have been slept on once, each by a different ornithologist. They are installed next to The Children Are Sleeping, a work made using the same logic. Whereas the ornithologists are defined by their eccentric passion, the children are arranged for their status of being non-adults, both having dreams ascribed to this iden- Jason Dodge, The Children Are Sleeping, 2011, pillows that have only tity. Both works are arranged to been slept on by children; Anyone, 2010, 10 sheets exchanged by a linen create the sense that the bodies service weekly 128 � 46 129 Sun Xun Some Actions which Haven’t This work is Sun Xun’s first Been Defined Yet in the animated film based entirely on Revolution, 2011 woodcuts, a traditional Chinese technique which is more than 2000 The woodcut animation Some years old and which experienced Actions Which Haven’t Been a revival during the Cultural Revo- Defined Yet In The Revolution lution in the 1960s and 1970s. depicts the nightmarish journey Is this the revolution and the of a character through a world disconcerted society left in its wake situated between waking and that Sun Xun speaks about? dreaming, day and night, past and More likely, it is not one specific present, in which all known, stable revolution from among the many boundaries—such as that between revolutions China experienced inside and outside, human and in the twentieth-century—but the beast—have become fluid. Time is ever-present effects of continuing dictated by traumatic flashbacks, revolutionary violence, and and the nightmare-like atmosphere the surreal underside of “official” of the work, which is underscored accounts of revolutionary reason by haunting music, is evoked and propagandistic promise, where not by violent actions, but by the revolution appears as sanctioned claustrophobic routines of everyday terror. The work depicts experience life. There are two iconic scenes of a world turned upside down in that define the work—one when which the rationality of irrationality the protagonist pulls an insect from has become the rule. between his teeth and eats it alive, and the other when the protagonist Sun Xun, born 1980 in China, masturbates. The latter scene lives and works in Beijing is the climax of the film, yet shows an anticlimax of sorts, with its undirected and unfulfilled libidinous energy. The former scene evokes the metaphor of “cannibalism” as an attitude and mental condi- tion, used by the influential author Lu Xun to describe the decay of Chinese consciousness. Lu Xun wrote The True Story of Ah Q. and was, not coinciden- tally, also an eminent scholar of Chinese woodcuts. Sun Xun, Some Actions Which Haven’t Been Defined Yet in the Revolution, 2011, animation, black and white, sound, 12 min 22 sec 130 � 47 131 Chang Chao-Tang Time of No Shadows, implicit contents of gestures 1959–2004 exposing themselves, revealing a physical, sedimentary memory As a photographer, writer, film- of collective expressions. In the maker, and teacher, Chang Chao- sequence we see several images Tang has been one of the chief of the human body waiting, gazing chroniclers of Taiwanese society in aspiration, or captured in move- since the late 1950s. The non- ment, frequently juxtaposed with chronological sequence Time figures of animals, real or repro- of No Shadows—a title alluding duced. It is through these animals, to an un-rememberable past and especially apes, that the thin and a non-imaginable future—starts unstable surface of reality breaks with a lesser-known picture from open and overflows with repressed his “Headless” series. The iconic or un-rememberable history and picture “Headless Self-Portrait” an excess of signs and meanings, depicts the photographer’s figure only to be hidden under veils as a shadow with no head, which or behind walls in the next picture. is cut off by the wall on which The frequent images of fortune- the shadow is cast. The work tellers and their diagrams of human alludes to a loss of control, to histo- faces or hands through which ries of de-culturalization, to a they “read” future and destiny sense of absurdism under totalist are iconic of this relationship power, and to history as subject- between the visible and invisible. less process. Comprising works These images are not historical dating from 1959 to 2004, the images in the sense that they sequence Time of No Shadows document a past; rather, what they unfolds as a continuous inversion capture is a scenography of an between spectators and scenes, historical experience. a continuous striving towards a missing, elusive, or hidden Chang Chao-Tang, born 1943 in element, exposing an ever-growing Taiwan, lives and works in Taipei gap between signs and their refer- ents. The photographs thus point towards a rupture or even an abyss in reality. In exploring this abyss, the photographs develop a differ- ent kind of realism—a realism of experience on the margins of the social order, opening the obtuse meaning which can only ever be Chang Chao-Tang, Panchiao, Taiwan 1962, photograph; remembered through the hidden, Chouchiang, Chiangsi, China 1989, photograph 132 � 48 133 Teng Chao-Ming A Monument for the ing free ultimately turns into its (Im)possibility of Figuring opposite, a trap through which he it Out, 2012 ultimately falls prey to the structure. The presentation of the “scene” The subject of this piece is the film as a monument further raises the A Brighter Summer Day (1991) question of the politics of memory. by seminal Taiwanese director Is there a similar trap or double Edward Yang. Together with Hou bind in the logic of memory and Hsiao-Hsien’s City of Sadness, historical narrative, in something A Brighter Summer Day has that endorses history after the fact become the main cinematic repre- as inevitable? How much of the sentation of Taiwan’s White Terror past can we figure out to support period (1949–1987). Set in Taipei what to memorize? On the window from 1959 to 1961, the film is based behind the sculpture, we read the on a real-life story: a schoolgirl’s final words of the girl (Ming): “I am murder by her boyfriend, consid- like this world. It will never change!” ered the first juvenile murder case In addition to the sculpture after 1949. With this film, Yang there is a series of documents on attempted to create a representa- display that analytically decom- tion of a period in Taiwan’s history pose the narrative into discrete that, in his own words, is “delib- actions, with the attempt to present erately ignored and forgotten”. the systemic interactions between He considered the actual murder all the actors. Teng’s diagrams are an inevitable result of the societal models to structurally understand structure and political environment, how “inevitability” and “empathy” and he uses the incident as a are building up in Yang’s film, and narrative tool to describe its logic. furthermore, to reflect on how The central element of Teng’s structure and human agency are work is a life-size sculpture depict- related in historical processes. ing the final scene of the film. This scene is the culmination of Teng Chao-Ming, born 1977 in a process of victimization: a girl Taiwan, lives and works in New being murdered, a murderer who York and Taipei is presented to us as the victim of circumstances. It is a scene of a dramatic and perverse dialectic logic, a so-called double bind: in the act of the murder the protago- nist attempts to reclaim his agency Teng Chao-Ming, A Monument for the (Im)possibility of Figuring it Out, from an environment that deprived 2012, fiberglass painted sculpture, digital archival print documents, him, but this attempt at break- newspaper clippings 134 � 49 The Museum of Ante-Memorials Curated by Eric Baudelaire Participating Artists: Robert Filliou, Deimantas Narkevičius, Peter Watkins

Memorials are usually created after and documents that open up catastrophes, commemorating fictional spaces. In this sense, the dead and reminding us that the ante-memorials in this exhibi- we should do all we can to prevent tion stage different scenarios: such tragedies in the future. what actually was versus what But the unending proliferation of will have been and the possibility war memorials suggests that of what could have been. 1 this second function, the prophy- The inaugural work in this lactic one, doesn’t always work museum is Peter Watkins’s as hoped. What happens if the film The War Game, produced and sequence is reversed? Can memo- censored by the BBC, depicting a rials also be constructed before nuclear attack on Great Britain in the fact, in the place of, or in the 1960s. In the style of an actual order to prevent an actual event news report or documentary, from happening? the film describes the devastating The Museum of Ante-Memo- consequences of the destruction rials explores this question by of the English county of Kent in a bringing together a constellation of nuclear exchange with the Soviet films and documents that expand Union. The extraordinary violence our understanding of the memorial. of the statistics enumerated in It explores the relation of memori- the voice-over, and the relentless als to past and future, to actuality shots of children in agony, of mass and possibility. It brings together graves and of burned flesh, have a fictions—imaginary scenarios, striking reality-effect that leaves us constructed facts— with docu- in shock even today, fifty years after ments relating to historical events it was made. “Fiction” here “mocks” that actually took place, in order reality as it seeks to prevent this to explore where the scenarios reality from becoming actual. they describe begin to overlap. After Watkins’s film, the viewer The museum presents fictions that encounters a series of collages 2 become documents before the by Robert Filliou titled Commemor fact, documentaries of a possibility, (Commission Mixte d’Échange de 136 � 49 137 Monuments aux Morts / Joint “If America would be able to say impact) but also in terms of style: Commission for the Exchange to the world, ‘You see what every effort is made to render of War Memorials) from 1970. weapon we had but did not use. the action ordinary, bureaucratic, The work is a proposition: “As for We are ready to renounce its methodical. The aftermath is these countries which nowadays use in the future and to join other suggested by shots of surrounding are thinking of going to war, they nations in working out adequate nature, the sound of strong wind, could consider exchanging their supervision of the use of this and a series of long takes of war memorials before instead of nuclear weapon.’” The Franck current Soviet-era nuclear making it.” Filliou’s proposition is Committee’s advice was prescient installations in an advanced state visualized with pictures of actual but went unheeded, a window into of decay. Is it a post-apocalyptic war memorials in Holland, Germany, the alternate history of what could world, or simply the spoils of time, and Belgium, which the Fluxus have been. the reassuring evidence of the artist has crudely cut out and The second document recalls end of the Soviet empire? And if it’s swapped with scissors and glue, the fate of the city of Kokura, the second hypothesis, why are turning existing war monuments Japan, the planned target of the we not comforted by these images into ante-memorials. second atomic bombardment of a past that never was? To the Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial on August 9, 1945. It is a film Hiroshima museum’s would have Museum is an actual memorial, shot from an observation plane been, to Watkins’s will have been, packed with documents, artefacts, showing the B-29 bomber Bock’s and to Filliou’s simple conditional, and personal accounts of the first Car making three circles over we witness Narkevičius’s was not. atomic bombardment, along Kokura in search of a hole in the In this conjugation of works, among with scientific perspectives on the unexpected cloud cover that other constants linked to their Manhattan Project. The Museum makes it impossible to visually “memorial” value, it is essentially of Ante-Memorials presents identify the target. Bock’s a question of time and truth, two historical documents from Car eventually diverts to a or of how time puts the notion Hiroshima, which, in an inversion secondary target: Nagasaki. These of truth in crisis. (Eric Baudelaire of Watkins’s and Filliou’s gestures, images of a silver plane navigating and Anselm Franke) open disturbing imaginary sce- the beautiful blue sky evoke the narios of what could have been. horror of reality juxtaposed with The first is an American memo- a vision of what was avoided, the randum addressed to the Secre- strange fate of one city saved from tary of War, in which a committee hell, and another one doomed, of scientists from the Manhattan by a few white clouds. Project recommend that the bomb Finally, the film The Dud should be dropped onto an unpop- Effect by Deimantas Narkevičius ulated island as a warning to presents the flipside of the fictional the Japanese, in order to avert the events of Kent in 1965: this film widespread horror a civilian bomb- simulates the launch of R-14 nuclear ing would produce and the inevita- missiles from a Soviet base in ble international arms race it would Lithuania in the 1970s. The Dud 1 peter Watkins, The War Game, 1965, 16mm film transferred to video, black and white, sound, 46 min trigger. The advice of the inventors Effect is the inverse of The War 2 Robert Filliou, Commemor, 1970 / 2003, 12 black and white photographs of the bomb to the politicians Games from a narrative standpoint mounted on plates, each 70 × 100 cm, Courtesy of Stiftung Museum that would use it went like this: (depicting the launch instead of the Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf 138 � 50 139 Chen Chieh-Jen Happiness Building I, 2012 Chen. Happiness Building I is set in an old apartment building Chen Chieh-Jen creates scenarios which will soon be demolished in his works in which “fiction” takes and replaced by a new structure. the place of—and thus reminds The tenants who live there prepare us of—that which is systematically to leave one by one. Inside the excluded from dominant paradigms apartment building we see an of “representation” in the political unemployed, a young women who sense of the word. The staged has no family, a lesbian whose scenarios of Chen’s works are shot father committed suicide after at the actual sites of the history or being out of work for a long time, the events or conditions he refers and a female sound artist who left to, and they involve a collective home after her parents divorced. process among his protagonists Outside the apartment building, that unfolds while the film’s set other figures assemble: a single is being built. woman exhausted from protest- The theme of Happiness Build- ing the Temporary Employment ing I is the generation of Taiwanese Act, a female laborer who works people born in the 1980s. Facing at a computer recycling center, a increasingly precarious lives, physically impaired actor working this is a generation for whom in a small theater who has long anxiety has become permanent. engaged in “silent standing” as This situation originated with a form of social action, a woman the neoliberal reforms implemented who dropped out of school after by the Taiwanese government becoming disenchanted with the beginning in 1984. These laws educational system and went have since affected countless fami- on to establish an archive on the lies, eroding labor rights, housing LoSheng Leper Sanatorium, and a rights, and access to social young social activist has also come services. The laws “passed to help move the possessions of a sentence on the futures” of the elderly person who live there alone, younger generation. but who are already gone, and The characters in Happiness all that are left are their luggage. Building I are based on young Happiness Building I is an image people who wrote short reflections for the atomization of individu- on their individual life histories als whose fates, under the new for Chen. The young people were economic dictate, have become from different backgrounds, but all “privatized” by society. lacked stable employment. Their Chen Chieh-Jen, Happiness Building I, 2012, 3-channel HD video stories became the basis for a Chen Chieh-Jen, born 1960 in installation, HD video transferred onto Blu-ray Disc, colour & b/w, sound, fictional narrative composed by Taiwan, lives and works in Taipei 82 min. Photograph: Chen You-wei 140 � 51 The Museum of the Infrastructural Unconscious Curated by John Palmesino.. and Ann-Sofi Ronnskog (Territorial Agency), and Anselm Franke, with Yi-Jen.. Chen and David Hellstrom Photobooks by Armin Linke Contribution by Ching-yueh Roan

The Museum of the Infrastructural directly into demarcations and Unconscious inserts itself amidst separations in space, with the the shifting relations between the result of a variety of deterministic form of contemporary polities and approaches to change now domi- sovereignties, and the form of their nating the horizon. The expansion material spaces of operation. It sets of the horizon of intervention, the out an inquiry into the models to scale and limits where to conceptu- govern, order, affect and structure alise and affect change, seem change by measuring, surveying, to link up to the imperial sweep quantifying, evaluating, connecting of modernity. and linking. At the juncture between On the other hand, at the side two trajectories of institutional and of these practices of delimitation spatial transformation, the museum and ordering processes, thrusts of phathoms two sets of archives disalignment and de-organisation and their conceptualisation of the are appearing on all sides. At odds connections between surveying, with the mainstay equivalence 1 documenting and envisioning be­­­tween transformation processes change and history. and organisational procedures On one hand, sectoral and and protocols, a series of fissures, expert knowledges have invested fragments, fault-lines are reshaping infrastructure discourses and prac- contemporary space of inhabita- tices, and driven the fragmentation tion. Rather than the unwanted, and separation of its many technical the disaligned, the left-overs, these know-hows. Separations in know- spaces appear to mark divergent hows and delimitations of fields of and syncopated paths of devel­ influence have been translated opment. A number of seemingly 143 non-connected events, projects and A second set of materials are initiatives are beginning to ask how organised in the museum through to step out of predefined orientation diachronic analysis. A vast cross- schemes, where politics, spaces, section of the satellite-data archive technologies, images and texts need of the Landsat program reveals not to be associated along lines the transformations in the material inscribed in previous knowledge. spaces of human cohabitation. The The first set of documentary constantly refreshed archive, which practices and materials stems scans the surface of the entire earth from the National Archives of the from an orbit altitude of +/- 705 Republic of China, and traces km, is sampled at three decades the complex political and cultural intervals from the end of martial location of Taiwan. Moving from law in the ROC. The materials that the colonial and imperial forms form the surface of the earth in this of modernity, the envisioned new region are mapped and analysed infrastructures of the 21st Century in their transformation processes. reverberate with the long modern Sounding the spectrum between growl of the control, management the frequencies of 0.45 – 0.52 μm, and engineering techniques the electromagnetic reflections set in motion to govern flows and detected by the Landsat multiple circulations of goods, materials, sensors depict the transformations energy, populations, information, in the hard surfaces, those finance. These techniques acceler- constituting the substrata, the ate in their turn the separation and infrastructure of human activities. distinction of the different paths that These are markers of complex cross and make up contemporary procedures to control, modulate, space. What seems to emerge contain and frame the shifting links, is a complex of systematic fragmen- the disetaneous sets of transforma- tation and separation, which tions between the form of contem- is aligning itself with the atomisation porary polity and contemporary of independent work and the anti- space. (Territorial Agency / John political swerves of current public Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog) life. How to think of a space where the constructions of ethical subjects are entangled with the construction of their spaces of cohabitation?

1-4 Armin Linke, Michele Achilli, Daniele Brigidini, Guido Canella, Nursery, 2- 4 Abbiategrasso (Milano) Italy, 14/09/2009; Kashiwazaki Kariwa Nuclear Power Station, reactor, Kashiwazaki Japan, 18/02/1998; ONU, New York USA, 08/12/2001; Computer dump, Guiyu China, 22/02/2005 144 � 52 145 Wei-Li Yeh Emperor Go in the City, himself to ingest a fragment of 2005–2012 bitter venison gall bladder nightly, until he later took revenge and Yeh’s work at various times interro- reclaimed the warring states gates what happens at the margins of what we now know as China. of contemporary capitalist society. The legend of Emperor Go Jian, Places play a crucial role in this who wanted to win back his interrogation, whether they be lost empire, is widely used as the margins of the city, abandoned a template for the Kuomintang’s sites and ruins, places that are fate and their claims on mainland transforming and giving way to China after they fled to Taiwan in something new, or simply those the late 1940s. Indeed, paintings places that are significant to the depicting Go Jian can still be found artist. It is in the crisis and disorder in many Taiwanese military instal- of the abandoned—in things lations today. It was just such a caught halfway between trash and discarded painting that Yeh found cultural artifact, and above all in in Kaoshiung. everything that is discarded—that Yeh took this painting to his he finds the material for his dense home in Taipei and photographed narratives which ultimately crystal- its journey through different lize in his photographic images. contexts, staging expressively The object in this series was quotidian scenes where the paint- found in 2005 in Wae Wu Yin, ing functions as mere backdrop. a former navy compound in the Along this eight-year journey Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung. which continues into the present, Shortly after, the compound was the painting naturally and super- destroyed to make way for the ficially decomposes and gets city’s new opera house. The object reassembled, as if in an attempt to is a painting depicting Emperor reconstruct the painting so it can Go Jian, an ancient and histori- be permanently archived before it cal figure, protagonist of popular finally disappears. Yeh constructs legends, and approaching divinity. this journey as a different kind Living some 2300 years ago, of homecoming—not as conquest Go Jian was the emperor of the and revenge, but as dispersal of a Yue Kingdom and is best known memory within a city, as a nomadic for having been captured and experience within the context of made to serve his enemies in the urban life and its struggles. Wu Kingdom for three years. While in captivity Emperor Go kept Wei-Li Yeh, born 1971 in Wei-Li Yeh, Emperor Go in the City, 2008,，#4 of 7 / Xiao-Chien, alive the humiliating memory of Taiwan, lives and works in Taipei Taipei, Taiwan, wooden light-box, lambda semi-transparency, this catastrophic defeat by forcing 100 × 120 × 15 cm 146 � 53 147 Jakrawal Nilthamrong Zero Gravity, 2012 old twins. The ten occupying guer- rillas were eventually killed by Thai The films of Jakrawal Nilthamrong forces, some apparently executed can be described as narrative on the spot after surrendering. and visual expeditions into border- This incident raised awareness lands. These are the borderlands of the political situation in Burma of truth, fiction, and the imaginary, and the war fought by the Karen the borderlands between life people in southern Burma, and and death, dream and wakefulness, was credited with sparking today’s and between the visible world and insurgency in southern Thailand. the invisible forces and spiritualities Beginning with shots of the that shape and traverse the differ- hospital which evoke memories ent registers of our experiences of this event, the film takes us and realities. Zero Gravity is the on a borderland journey, from second of Nilthamrong’s films road incidents and the Thai social that engages with “gravity” as an services that compete for the invisible force, which, like “karma,” bodies of the dead, to mysterious presents us only with its results. encounters in the jungle where His earlier work Man and Gravity the protagonist, whose memory we showed a man’s struggle with are traversing, encounters, among gravity in his attempts to use a others, the Karen twins, the motorbike to pull a huge weight infamous generals of God’s Army. up a mountain. But in Zero Gravity, “gravity” refers to the aftermath Jakrawal Nilthamrong, born of violence events. 1977 in Thailand, lives and Zero Gravity is a work about works in Bangkok the borderland between Thailand and Burma, and the borderland between fiction and truth, as well as past and present. Set in Ratchaburi, not far from Bangkok, the film follows a man on a journey into the history of the region. In 2000, Ratchaburi hospital was the site of a national incident, when the hospital was occupied and staff taken hostage by armed Karen guerrillas under the command of the “God’s Army” from neighboring Burma, the leadership of which was attributed to two twelve-year- Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Zero Gravity, 2012, HD video, colour, sound, 28 min 148 � 54 149 Maria Thereza Alves Destroy Miramar Resort, 2012 campaigning against the “develop- Announcement of Attempts ment” and the privatization of to Guarantee the Future these lands for several years. Existence of Taiwan, 2012 The construction of this grand new tourist resort, situated in a bay Maria Thereza Alves’s videos and that is a traditional fishing ground installations speak about the for the aboriginal Amis people continuity and actuality of colonial and that is also home to a coral relations by addressing questions reef, has been halted by a court of representation and the ruling that contests the validity politics of memory, expropriation, of the building permits and environ- and land rights. Her works critique mental impact studies. the idea of stable identities and Alves’s second intervention stand as a counter-model to any consists of a performance with version of the evolutionary story a gong player, who will regularly of progress and to all that is perform in select public spaces normally taken for granted or in the city of Taipei. The gong assumed as unavoidable or without is a traditional form of public alternative in the historical process announcement but has long been of a colonial modernity. It is her in decline. The content of the involvement in the struggles of announcements will refer to imme- indigenous populations around the diate demands made by Taiwan’s world against dispossession and aboriginal peoples in their current cultural destruction that has made struggles, such as the Miramar her focus on so-called “local” Resort struggle, the Tao people’s knowledges and historical counter- struggle against a nuclear waste narratives. dump on Orchid Island, and the For the Taipei Biennial 2012, Taroko people’s fight against the Alves has organized two performa- Asia Cement Corporation. tive works. The first work brings the ongoing struggle of indigenous Maria Thereza Alves, born people against the corporate 1961 in Brazil, lives and works development of their coastlands in Berlin into the context of the Biennial opening, asking the Biennial’s curator to wear a T-shirt supporting the campaign against the Miramar Resort on Taitung’s Shanyuan Maria Thereza Alves, Announcement of Attempts to Guarantee the Beach during the official parts of Future Existence of Taiwan, 2012, performance in the Taipei Fine Arts the ceremony. Local activists and Museum, public spaces of the city and corporate headquarters. environmental groups have been Courtesy of Galerie Michel Rein 150 The Two Year Project The Two Year Project (2Y) began Importantly, with the help as an experiment on behalf of the of the Goethe Institute in Taipei, curators of the Taipei Biennial 2010 a midterm conference was held (TB10): the first artists invited in Fall 2011, which helped focus to the show were asked to join in and consolidate the 2Y project and a collective effort to define what generate further discussion on the is missing in the biennial industries work in question. In January 2013, as we now know them. The one the 2Y project presents “Closing factor everyone could agree Seminar”, hosted by TB12, to pres- on was the chronic lack of time. ent the final contributions on behalf Time to develop, time to install, and of all participating artists. time to mediate your project as an artist. A unanimous decision was http://2yearproject.blogspot.com taken to pursue a conversation over two years, taking the commis- sions for the TB10 as a point of departure. Each of the ten participating artists approached the idea in completely different ways. Some brought the initial TB10 commis- sion to a logical conclusion, such as Lara Almarcegui, Christian Jankowski, Pak Shuang Chuen, Chia-En Jao and Shi Jin-Hua. Others reconsidered their working premises in light of newer develop- ments. Take, for instance, Olivia Plender’s Invisible Theatre, Mario Garcia Torres’ A Reversal of Stan- dard Operational Procedures, the book project by Michael Portnoy or the TFAM demolition plan as proposed by Chris Evans. 152 153 Programme

Special projects Events and Performances

The 360° Stroke Working With… (Monsters, 28.09.2012 Black Birds and Blackbirds (II) Project by Francisco Camacho Institutions and Others) Boris Ondreička 21.09 – 27.09: Training courses Lecture by Zak Kyes The Waiting Hall. 21:00 – 22:20 01.10 – 05.10: Class dates 22.09 (14:30– 17:30) Scenes of Modernity Gallery on 3rd floor, TFAM Round one 14:00 – 14:50 Auditorium, TFAM Hannah Hurtzig Round two 15:00 – 15:50 Performative event The Un-erasable 20:00 – 22:00 Liu Ding Shilin Sport Centre Lobby, TFAM 19:45 – 21:00 No.1, Shihshang Rd., Shihlin Performance by District, Taipei City 111, Taiwan T: (02) 2880-6066 Announcement of Attempts Liu Ding and Li Ran F: (02) 2880-5966 to Guarantee the Future Gallery on ground floor, TFAM E: [email protected] Existence of Taiwan (register at the Shilin Sport Centre Maria Thereza Alves 29.09.2012 information desk) Performance in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, public spaces of the city The Politics of an Exhibition: Happiness Building I and corporate headquarters. Mythology, Images, Space Project by Chen Chieh-Jen Performer / assistant director: Lecture series by Anselm Franke, The film set constructed Titan Jian John Palmesino and Eric Baudelaire by the film crew and cast Performance time: 35 min 14:30 – 17:30 are open for visiting www.taipeibiennial.org Auditorium, TFAM 29.09 – 30.12 (13:00 – 18:00) Closed on Mondays Destroy Miramar Resort The Un-erasable Maria Thereza Alves Liu Ding No.115, Sanjun St., Shulin Dist., Performance by Anselm Franke 12:30 – 14:30 New Taipei City Located inside the factory during preview and opening Event by Liu Ding, Li Ran of the Yi-Ping Construction TFAM and Cheng Mei-Ling Material Company Gallery on ground floor, TFAM

The Two Year Project (2Y) Paper Mill Reception In January 2013, the 2Y project Performance by Pak Sheung Chuen of TB10 presents “Closing Seminar”, Films by Tony Chun-Hui Wu hosted by TB12, to present the 19:00 – 20:30 final contributions on behalf of all The Paper Mill participating artists. (Cocktails served) http://2yearproject.blogspot.com/ 154 Sponsors Acknowledgements 155

Organized by We would like to sincerely thank USA; Long Fa Tang; Madukismo the following individuals and Sugarcane Factory (Yogyakarta); organizations, whose generous Ministry of Foreign Affairs, help has made this exhibition Republic of China (Taiwan); Official Support possible. Mondriaan Foundation; Monitor Gallery; Museum of Bamboo institution / Organisation Art, Nantou; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Muzeum Aanant & Zoo; Art Book Cologne; Sztuki (Łódź); National Aeronautics Atomic Engergy Council; Aurora and Space Administration Group; Bamboo Curtain Studio; (NASA); National Archives USA; Beitou Museum; Bentley Park National Archives and Records Suites; Boston Public Library; Administration, Washington D.C.; Central Weather Bureau of Taiwan; National Palace Museum; National International Support Chinese Taipei Film Archive; Taiwan University, Department of Christine König Galerie, Vienna; Psychology; Nederlands Instituut CNAP (centre national des arts voor Beeld en Geluid; Nederlands plastiques); Cornell University; Instituut voor Mediakunst; David M. Rubenstein Rare Numthong Gallery; Paul Sacher Book & Manuscript Library; Foundation, Basel; Peng Ming Min David Rumsey Map Collection; Foundation; Peters Edition Limited, Department of Botany Taiwan London; Quality Information Forestry Research Institute; Duke Publishers; Rijksakademie van University; Earthly Clinic; Estate beeldende kunsten; Scala, of Hanne Darboven; European Florence; Schott Music, Mainz; Space Agency (ESA); Faculty Science & Society Picture Library; of Mass Communication and ShanghART Gallery; Tainan Special Projects Sponsor Journalism, Thammasat University; Veterans Home; Taipei Artists Galerie Urs Meile; gb agency, Village; Taipei City Archives; Paris; GMVZ; Goethe-Institute Teater Garasi (Yogyakarta); The Taipei; Gourd Art Museum; Guan BOX Gallery; The British Library; Lo Yin; HCT LOGISTICS CO., The Freesound Project; The Juan LTD.; Hiroshima Peace Memorial Downey Estate; The Press of the Assisted by Museum; Institute of History and Nova Scotia College of Art and Philology; Jan Mot, Brussels; Jiu Design; The Seismological Center; Xiang Ju Books; Kavalan Tribe; The Theosophical Society; Kheel Center, The University of The University of Chicago Library; Florida; Konrad Fischer Galerie; Trees Music & Art; Trouble La Synagogue de Delme; Les Magazine; Wellcome Library; Documents Cinématographiques, π Animation Studio Paris; Library of Congress, 156 Acknowledgements Acknowledgements 157

and Magers, Cologne); Nanna Ella Raidel; Jan Ralske; Ching- Heidenreich; Lorenz Helbling Yueh Roan; Laurie Robins; Jeffrey Justice Abusa; Putri Adju (Ark (ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai); Rosen (Misako & Rosen Gallery, Gallery, Jakarta); Lee Ambrozy; Margareta Helleberg (Moderna Tokyo); Arin Rungjang; Murayama Dorothy Amenuke; Angela Museet, Stockholm); Eva Höfler Sachiko; Gerald Salgado; Ewa Anderson; Michael Andrews; Kaim (Christine König Galerie, Vienna); Sapka-Pawliczak; Rizky Sasono; Ang; Thomas Argiro; Wolfgang Manray Hsu; Merak Huang; Erika Satoh; Radovan Scasascia; Becker; Markus Bernhard (Goethe- Kwang-Kuo Huang; Huang Kai-Fong Shi; Benedicte Sehested; Institut Taipei); Nathalie Boutin; Yan-Yan; Hung Kan (curator for Shi Pei-Jun; Margaret Shiu; Frauke Breede (Galerie Thomas Gourd art museum); Kung Yi-Fang; Ana Sokoloff; Stefanie Schulte Zander, Cologne); Stefan Britton; Nabu Husungan Istanda; Lori G. Strathaus; Dr. Su Sheng-Chieh; Annett Busch; Joel Ruiz Butuyan; Juvida; Max Kahlen; Kammarheit; Kuen-Lung Su; Monika Szewczyk; Cai Zhen-Yu; Christian Casse; Michael Keevak; Irfan Khatri; Nina Tabassomi; Yudi Ahmad Francois Casse; Chang Cheng- Christine König (Christine König Tajudin; Alexander D. Tan; Suehli Jen; Chang En-Maan; Chao Galerie, Vienna); Panai Kusui; Tan; Marshal Tie Jia (Temple of the Hsia-Hsien; Lee Chatametikool; Tara Lal (Chatterjee and Lal, Empress of Heaven (Mazu), Beigan Mortimer Chatterjee (Chatterjee Mumbai); Jamaludin Latief; David Township Chinbi Village); Barbara and Lal, Mumbai); Dan Chen; Rita Lawson; Miriam Lazoff; Lee Peng- Thumm (Galerie Barbara Thumm); Chen; Chen Qi-bang; Chen Fang- hsiang; Ding-Li Lee; Li Jie-Hua; Li Miguel Tomacruz; Tsai Chuen- Ming; Zian Chen; Chen Szu-Ting; Ran; Maggie Liao; Filiep and Mimi Horng; Arthur Tsay; Bahrul Ulum; Chen Xindong (Chen Xindong Libeert; Patrizia Libralato (Birch Julie Ulvestad; Rene Vienet; Heidi Gallery, Beijing); Amy Cheng; Libralato, Toronto); Lin Hsiao-Wei Voet; Kai Vollmer; Chia Chi Jason Chien Fan Chen (Department of (The Seismological Center, Central Wang; David Der-Wei Wang; Wang Botany Taiwan Forestry Research Weather Bureau of Taiwan ); Millie Jiang-Xiong; Wang Shao-Gang; Institute); Katy Shiu-Chih Chien; Tien-Hui Lin; Lin Zhen-Yun; Lin Hui-Min Wei; Wei Yan-Nian; Wei Ben Chou; Chu Po-Ying; Yung- Guang-Ron; Aimée Lin; Pei-Yu Lin; Sung (Goethe-Institut Taipei); Feng Chung (Labour Exchange Andrea Lissoni; Lisa Luo (British Camille Weiner; Malwina Woest Band); Jean-Marie Courant; Council, Taipei); Esther Lu; Carol (Eidotech); Nicole Wolf; Wu Matthew Cunningham; Deng Yinghua Lu; Evonne Mackenzie Shu-Lun; Wu Hsuan-Hsuan; Da-Xin; Guillaume Désanges (British Council, London); Xiao Ling; Yuan-you Xuan; Kai Yen; (Trouble); Marck Dickenson Giovanni Majer; Inge Maruyama Yang Yi-Ju; Yang Du; Pauline Yao; (Neue Alte Brücke, Berlin); Pauline (Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast, Yu Shan-Lu; Zheng Mei-Ling; Doutreluingne; Marilys B. Downey; Düsseldorf); Charles Mazé; Zheng Yong-Chang; Zhou Rui-Fa; Bassam El Baroni; Fan Xiao-Lan; Mister Michael; Mister NY; Jan Jim Zhu; Arnas Ziedavicius; Feng Zhi-Ming; Chiara Figone Mot; Marc Mozga; Chris Mullen Tirdad Zolghadr; Theus Zwakhals (Archive Books, Berlin); Gridthiya (Wellcome Library, London); (Netherlands Media Arts Institute)阿道燕 Gaweewong; Ginger Glacier’s Ng Yan Yan; Sonja Oehler; Reiko 伉儷 eggs; Lina Gopaul; Jow-Jiun Gong; Ogura; Louie Ojeda; A-Yu Pan; Solène Guillier; Guo Jau-Lan; Qing-Shui Pan; Wu-Ji Pan; Hila Alexander Hahn (Aanant & Zoo, Peleg; Capucine Perrot; Radim Berlin); Heide Häusler (Sprüth Peško; Raquel Pinto; Yu-Xun Peng; 158 159

Modern Monsters / Project Assistants Information Technology English Copyeditor Death and Life of Fiction Eve June Liu, Hui-Ting Huang, Yen Lin, Chien-Nan Liao Michael Andrews Taipei Biennial 2012 Wei-Ching Chuan, Chia-Ling Lee, Photographers 29.09.2012 – 13.01.2013 Chih-Ying Lee, Wan-Yi Chang, Chih-Ho Chen, Yung-Jen Chen Chinese Copyeditor Pei-Shin Hung, Kai Nien, Yi-Ning Shen Director of I-Huei Lin, York Chu, Documentary Video Taipei Fine Arts Museum Fei-Hao Chen, Selene Hung Life Scenery Films Ltd. English to Chinese Translators Hai-Ming Huang Sylvie Lin, Yi-Ning Shen, Exhibition Display Officers Educational Program Eric Chang, Sabrina Yen, Museum Development Board Chien-Hau Feng, Han-Yu Chih Educational Program Supervisor Yen-Huei Tsuei, Wanling Chen, Ming-Hsing Liu, Tsun-Lin Liao, Chien-Kuo Liu Mathew Yu, Tze-Chien Liu, Chien-Kuo Liu, Lily Chang, Exhibition Design Nobuo Takamori, Hsin-I Lin, Fang-Wei Chang, Yu-Ming Lin, Anselm Franke and Zak Group Lectures and Seminar Executive Miranda Chang, Sandy Lee Ping-Chung Yu, Jen-Kui Chen, in collaboration with CoDKT Su-Fong Wang Yu-Chen Pai Chinese to English Translators Public Relations Guided Tours Coordinators Brent Heinrich, David J. Toman Exhibition Team Li-Wei Lu, Shun-Wen Yang, Judy Hsiao, Luso, Li-Ya Chuang, Curator Chia-Ching Chang Swee Shi, Hsuan-Chun Lin Printer Anselm Franke Chia Shin Printing CO., LTD., Technical Coordinators Special Project Taipei Taiwan Assistant Curator Hong-Tu Chen, Herman Wang, Chiung-Yu Chen, Hsuan-Chun Lin, Heidi Ballet Mason Tseng, Yi-Chen Lin Janet Chia-Hui Lin Texts by Anselm Franke, Heidi Ballet, the Mini Musuem Curatorial Assistant Electricity and Guidebook & Journal curators and the artists Chun-Chi Wang Lighting Technicians Publisher Chang-Wei Tseng, Hai-Ming Huang, Director of Taipei Biennial and Feng-Huang Tsai, Chong-De Liu, Taipei Fine Arts Museum International Projects Office Yu-Cheng Chang Fang-Wei Chang Chief Editor General Affair Officers Anselm Franke, Exhibition Assistant Yu-Ming Lin, Yun-Nuo Liao, Brian Kuan Wood (Journal) Kat Siao De-Shuin Jao, Ming-Yu Chang Executive Editor Exhibition Officers Accountants Yen-Ing Chen Yi-Ting Lei, Mei-Ching Fang, Ping-Chu ng Yu, Shu-Ting You, I-Ying Chiang, Zoe Li Design and Art Direction Tzu-Hsiu Su Zak Group assisted by Rohan Hu Government Ethics Officer Exhibition Coordinators Yu-Chen Pai Design Executive Jade Wang, Singer Hsu, Rohan Hu (Chinese) Sabrina Yen 160

Published by Taipei Fine Arts Museum 181, Zhong Shan N. Road, Sec. 3, Taipei 10461, Taiwan, R.O.C. T: 886-2-2595-7656 F: 886-2-2594-4104 www.tfam.museum

© September 2012, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan All rights reserved. Copyright: the artists, the authors and the photographers. Published on the occasion of the Taipei Biennial 2012. taipei biennial 2012

John Akomfrah Pratchaya Phinthong Maria Thereza Alves Roee Rosen Adam Avikainen Andreas Siekmann Ashish Avikunthak Elisa Strinna Eric Baudelaire Sun Xun Fernando Bryce Teng Chao-Ming Chang Chao-Tang Rosemarie Trockel Chen Chieh-Jen Anton Vidokle Yin-Ju Chen & Hu Fang Yu-Cheng Chou Danh Vo Jason Dodge Wei-Li Yeh Jimmie Durham Harun Farocki The Museum of Omer Fast Ante-Memorials Peter Friedl The Museum of Crossings Simon Fujiwara The Museum of Gourd Andrea Geyer The Museum of the Yervant Gianikian Infrastructural & Angela Ricci Lucchi Unconscious Virlani Hallberg The Museum of the Hsu Chia-Wei monster That Is History Hannah Hurtzig The Museum of Rhythm Luis Jacob Maryam Jafri CURATOR Anselm FRANKE Chia-En Jao Rajkamal Kahlon Kao Chung-Li Joachim Koester Jompet Kuswidananto Marysia Lewandowska & Neil Cummings Liu Ding Joven Mansit Angela Melitopoulos & Maurizio Lazzarato Jakrawal Nilthamrong Boris Ondreička Willem Oorebeek The Otolith Group Pak Sheung Chuen

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