Over the weekend Parasol Unit Foundation announced they would be closing their London exhibition space in March 2020. The foundation, however, will continue to organise exhibitions in different venues, ‘in whatever part of the world I feel the dialogue is needed’, Iran-born director Ziba Ardalan said in a statement. Almost simultaneously, Beijing-based institution UCCA announced the opening a third space in Shanghai in 2021, one year only after the opening of UCCA Dune, a satellite museum in Hebei Province.
Over in Berlin, the winners of two major art prizes have been announced: painter Monika Baer, as the winner of the Hannah Höch Award for lifetime achievement, will receive €25,000 and a solo exhibition opening in June 2020 at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin. As recipient of the Hannah Höch Förderpreis for midcareer artists, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, who represented Germany at this year’s Venice Biennale, is handed a €38,000 prize, with two-thirds going towards the production of an exhibition and a publication.
The Sharjah Biennial Foundation has announced that the biennale’s 15th edition will aim to present the final exhibition project curator Okwui Enwezor was working on, when he passed away in March. Enwezor started working on the biennale’s upcoming edition at the start of 2018, and under the title Thinking Historically in the Present, it will consider the ‘the future of the biennial model’. SB15 will also include Postcolonial, the second in a trilogy of exhibitions Enwezor had conceptualised for Haus Der Kunst during his time as artistic director (the first chapter, Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and Atlantic, 1945–1965 took place in 2016–17). In other biennial news, there are (yet another) two new kids on the global art block: the inaugural Helsinki Biennial, slated to open in June 2020, will be placed under the signe of ecology and interdependence. Titled Under the Same Sea, and curated by Pirkko Siitari and Taru Tappola from the Helsinki Art Museum, the biennial will bring together 35 artists (including Paweł Althamer, BIOS Research Unit, Tadashi Kawamata, Tuomas A. Laitinen and more) to reflect on the biosphere as one interconnected entity. Back in Beijing, a new media art triennial organised by the CAFA Art Museum will open in January. Curated by CAFA’s Zhang Ga, the Techne Triennial is significantly larger in scale than its Scandinavian counterpart (about 120 works by 130 artists), and will seek to focus on the intersection of art and technology through two major exhibitions, one of them curated by co-organised by ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the German institution studying the effects of new media and digitisation.
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