The Power Station of Art (PSA) has launched the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, as an ‘in crescendo’ project starting with a five-day programme titled PHASE 01: A WET-RUN REHEARSAL. In response to the flux of COVID-19, this edition of Shanghai Biennale will be held over an eight-month period and incorporates a three-phase programme that will encourage artists, thinkers and curators participating in the biennial ‘to develop their work in close collaboration with the City of Shanghai, its people, networks of activism, organizations, and institutions’.
For the first phase, the biennial’s chief curator, architect and writer Andrés Jaque, alongside a curatorial team composed of You Mi, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos, will collaborate with the School of Philosophy of Fudan University, the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts, and the multimedia network DOCU TV to run the five-day performed summit of lectures, debates, screenings and workshops.
Participants include artists Itziar Ocariz, Himali Singh Soin, Tong Wenmin and Clare Britton; thinkers Astrida Neimanis, Sun Xiangchen, Zhao Tingyang, Weng Zijian, Wang Hongzhe, Hou Hanru and Mark Wigley; and filmmakers the Karrabing Film Collective, Yong Xiang Li, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Pema Tseden, and Jenna Sutela. The programme will ‘advocate for the Biennale’s engagement in processes of planetary reconnection relying on transspecies collectivity… thinking beyond human-centered and nation-based narratives and connecting the discussions of bodies with those of the environment’.
The Power Station of Art concludes: ‘This edition will nurture art as an ecosystem of practices closely connected to different forms of human and non-human knowledge, sense, and intelligence. In close collaboration with Shanghai’s universities and networks of independent art spaces and activism, the Biennale will build on art’s interdependency with science, social constructs, technology, and modes of spirituality. Rather than presenting art as autonomous, the biennale will provide a platform to acknowledge the diversity in which research and knowledge-making happens and is disseminated.’
Information on the three phrases are as follows:
PHASE 01: A WET-RUN REHEARSAL
10–14 November 2020
A summit bringing together contributors to present their work in the form of a performative assembly taking place in the PSA’s Grand Hall and spreading out to networks of art spaces along the Yangtze River.
PHASE 02: AN ECOSYSTEM OF ALLIANCES
15 November 2020 – 9 April 2021
Keeping a permanent post at the PSA, the “in crescendo” project associates itself with infra-structures where online/offline social and communal life are taking place. These include streaming TV channels, social media, university programs, and serial interventions on urban dynamics.
PHASE 03: AN EXHIBITION
10 April – 27 June 2021
Opening with a festival, the Biennale will unfold into an exhibition that will run through PSA and expand into a series of locations along the Huangpu River and across the city of Shanghai.
