Architect and writer Andrés Jaque is to curate the 13th Shanghai Biennale. The New York-based Jacque is director of the Advanced Architectural Design Program at Columbia University and founder of the Office for Political Innovation, a design practice that operates at the intersection of architecture and art, ‘exploring how bodies, technologies and environments converge in transspecies alliances’.
Using the title 水体 Bodies of Water, alongside a curatorial team featuring You Mi, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos, Jacque plans to reformat the exhibition as a ‘crescendo’, taking place over nine months from 10 November, that ‘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, it will provide a platform to acknowledge the diversity in which research and knowledge-making happens and is disseminated.’
The biennial will take place at the Power Station of Art, the organising institution, as well as extend to other sites along the Yangtze and Huangpu rivers, and elsewhere in Shanghai.
