Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Anselm Franke. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Anselm Franke. Mostrar todas las entradas
26/11/13
The Whole Earth; article by Martina Angelotti at Domus, 2013.
The exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt
in Berlin demonstrates the intellectual commitment between the 1960s
and 1970s, mostly in California, starting from the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand's manual, that Jobs considered the forerunner of Google.
The
Blue Planet is the image of the Earth seen from space and has been one
of the most popular icons of recent times, having replaced the Mushroom
Cloud – the symbol of the post-war period and the Cold War.
Stewart Brand picked it in 1968 for the cover of the first issue of his Whole Earth Catalog,
hoping it would make human beings see the Earth as a single place where
racism and intolerance would shy into insignificance when viewed from a
distance and as part of such a large universe.
Stewart Brand (Ed.): Whole Earth Catalog. Access to Tools, Spring 1969 (Backcover)
The Whole Earth Catalog
was a manual encouraging people to create their own environment and
lifestyle and to see the Earth as a precious asset to be respected and
nurtured through knowledge.
“We are gods”, said Brand in 1968 when speaking about his Catalog “At a time when a New Left was calling for grass-roots political (i.e., referred) power, Whole Earth eschewed politics and pushed grassroots direct power – tools and skills. At a time when New Age hippies were deploring the intellectual world of arid abstraction, Whole Earth pushed science, intellectual endeavor, and new technology as well as old.”
“We are gods”, said Brand in 1968 when speaking about his Catalog “At a time when a New Left was calling for grass-roots political (i.e., referred) power, Whole Earth eschewed politics and pushed grassroots direct power – tools and skills. At a time when New Age hippies were deploring the intellectual world of arid abstraction, Whole Earth pushed science, intellectual endeavor, and new technology as well as old.”
Eleanor Antin, Merrit from California Lives,
1969; replicated 1998. Gasoline can, bush hat with “peace” decal, metal
comb, and text panel. Dimensions variable. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine
Arts, New York
“The Whole Earth” exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt
speaking on behalf of this approach, a demonstration of an intellectual
commitment that has turned its focus to the decade between the 1960s
and 1970s, mostly in California – a fertile and propitious terrain for
the development of the American counterculture, a historical forerunner
of that which shortly followed called the “Californian Ideology”. The
legacy of the hippy culture and its fusion with cybernetics, the
hard-won battles and ensuing projects linked to ecology and the
environmental heritage, the fusion of black and white music and that of
the dissidents, psychedelics and digital culture. California über Alles
sang the Dead Kennedys in the 1980s. The curator Anselm Franke, along
with Diedrich Diedrichsen, conveys this political, cultural and social
vibrancy with the same intensity of its origins and growth, adopting
visual, exhibition and scientific expedients that sustain Stewart
Brand’s fundamental idea.
View of the exhibition "The Whole Earth
California and the Disappearance of the Outside"
Written texts,
archive images and video and audio recordings can be enjoyed on
mini-displays installed on printed panels. These form micro theme-rooms
inside the space that symbolises Western Modernism. The mobile stools
that visitors can move at their will and convenience to enjoy the
individual records convey a fluid and functional mobility. A section on
psychedelic research and the experimental cinema, with Stan Vanderbeek’s
Manifesto, Land Art and ecology works and experiments by Nancy Holt and
Robert Smithson, the Beat Generation and its influence on music and
performances including, to mention but one, a Lawrence Jordan film.
Visitors can listen to music – from Bob Marley’s “Exodus” in the Babylon
section to “We Can Be Together” sung by Jefferson Airplane in 1969 even
though they were “outlaws in the eyes of America”.
Production in the Desert. In Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, January 1971. Stewart Brand (Ed.): Whole Earth Catalog. Access to Tools, Spring 1969 (Backcover)
Renowned Otolith 1 work in the Otolith group’s
trilogy which, as described by Brian Rogers, “evokes a non-metaphorical
weightlessness of alien intimacy” to pictures by Jack Goldstein
capturing “the spectacular instant” of natural and scientific phenomena.
This exhibition is a true statement and a fascinating experiment in how an institution known as a “house of culture” can pursue its informative, scientific and communication aims.
This exhibition is a true statement and a fascinating experiment in how an institution known as a “house of culture” can pursue its informative, scientific and communication aims.
View of the exhibition "The Whole Earth
California and the Disappearance of the Outside"
Not
strictly speaking a museum that conducts experiments and exhibits
products of artistic research but a public institution with broader aims
and objectives that relates to the mass public, raising its awareness
and involving it in a concept of culture.
The decision to be represented by someone like Anselm Franke, a curator with the finest of intellects and unquestioned ability, is also interesting. Even on his debut here, Franke impressed people with the great insight with which he conceived and staged the theme of animism, an exemplary result on his Ph.D subject. I appreciate and admire the professionalism and depth with which certain themes widely represented and at risk of generalisation in the public domain have, instead, been dealt with and become a part of what, in its own small way, is a keystone not only of the scientific/curatorial approach but also of the even more important one of the work/spectator dialectic.
The decision to be represented by someone like Anselm Franke, a curator with the finest of intellects and unquestioned ability, is also interesting. Even on his debut here, Franke impressed people with the great insight with which he conceived and staged the theme of animism, an exemplary result on his Ph.D subject. I appreciate and admire the professionalism and depth with which certain themes widely represented and at risk of generalisation in the public domain have, instead, been dealt with and become a part of what, in its own small way, is a keystone not only of the scientific/curatorial approach but also of the even more important one of the work/spectator dialectic.
Philipp Lachenmann, SHU-Still, 2003/2008
Lightjet print behind acrylic, framed, edition: 6 + 1 AP
125,5 x 167,5 cm, framed. © Galerie Andreas Binder und / and Philipp Lachenmann
It is
symptomatic of a crucial moment in history that something similar should
also have happened at Berlin’s Kunstwerk, which a year ago hosted
Arthur Zmijewski’s controversial Biennale. In the same city but in a
totally different institution and one with totally different aims, the
curator Ellen Blumenstein, who recently took over as director, developed
a wholly unusual exhibition by institutional standards. She then asked
Nedko Solakov to translate the visual layout of her extensive curatorial
project in the revamped spaces of the Kunstwerk with his texts and
drawings – a sort of expanded statement in which each visitor has a
chance to enter into direct dialogue with its programme and strategies,
expressed in the form of teasers and even with an Avatar of Ellen
herself.
Eleanor Antin, Going Home, 2004, from Roman Allegories, chromogenic print, 124 x 260 cm. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York / Anonymouscollection
At a time in
history when contemporary art (as too politics) needs to rediscover its
rapport and dialogue with the public, two institutions have sought to
pursue this aim in different manners and forms, here in Berlin.
In his
Commencement address to Stanford University in 2005, Steve Jobs spoke
the words “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”. Jobs was quoting Stewart Brand
(who also invented the term personal computer). His Catalog was
repeatedly mentioned and Jobs considered it the forerunner of Google.
Seeing this exhibition is an ideal exercise in putting this statement
into practice. Don’t forget where you are coming from or where you are.
The universe is immense. Martina Angelotti (@martinanji)Article from here.
29/4/13
Monster, History, Fiction; Interview with Anselm Franke, Curator of the Taipei Biennial 2012
Monster, History, Fiction
Interview with Anselm Franke, Curator of the Taipei Biennial 2012
Interview made on the 22nd July, 2012, in Taipei
by Sylvie Lin
In contemporary art, photographical elements are often integrated into installation works or being used as a means of archiving. VOP interviewed Anselm Franke, curator of the Taipei Biennial 2012 (to be held in September) to talk about the topic of the biennial, ‘Modern Monsters / Death and Life of Fiction’ and specific photographic works that will be shown in the exhibition.
Q Please talk about your past curatorial experiences.
A Originally, I used to work in the fields of theatre, film and television with artist/filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief ; he passed away in 2010 and represented Germany in the Venice Biennale in 2011. From 2003 to 2005, I collaborated with architects in making exhibitions. We didn’t look at the architecture as design but more as planning processes and political geographies. What was important for me in my collaboration with architects is that it is a way to think political questions and the organization of the space. Since 2003, most of the projects I was involved with were collaborations. We shared a common interest in ‘borders’, not only physical borders (of the buildings or the states) but rather social and political borders and borders of the imagination, the way images take part in creating limits. The way we are now trying to use the figure of the monster for the 2012 Taipei Biennial also has to with this interest: the monster is always a limit figure or a liminal figure. There are various forms of monsters, beyond the borders of the human, of the normal, of the laws of reality, etc. Most of these borders and limits appear to us more or less “given” or even natural. The curatorial task is to open up and de-stabilize this understanding, to show how limits are constructed, what is the role of culture, technologies and non-human factors in their making.
Another important experience is that I’ve worked with film for a long time. In 2005, with Stephanie Schulte Strathaus, we founded the Forum Expanded, a section for art and film within the Berlin International Film Festival/Berlinale. Since then, every year, we organized sections on artists’ films, and filmmakers who do installations in the context of the Berlinale.
Q Please talk about your ‘Animism’ project (ref : http://www.extracity.org/en/projects/view/52). Is it connected to the Taipei Biennial 2012 in certain ways ?
A ‘Animism’ was conceived as a project to question the story we tell about modernity. What is modernity? What are normally the sort of images and stories that we connect with this idea? ‘Animism’ used to be a concept used by European anthropologists to describe what was at the opposite of modernity. If you are not modern then you are animist. We used the concept as mirror not to look at the so-called ‘animist’, neither did we intend to make an exhibition ‘about’ animism. Rather, we used the history of the concept to look back at the ideas of those who called others ‘animist’. Again, it’s very much about borders. Because the way European scholars described the animism of peoples in South America, Africa, Siberia, Japan…was always as the absence of the same distinctions that modern people do, such as between a pure subjective inside and an objective nature that follows all the natural laws. In animism, you have a different relationship to things, to nature; you don’t treat them as just “dead matter” that is indifferent to humans. Therefore, it is also about borders: it’s about drawing certain distinctions differently, and this concerns literally everything: everyday experience just as much as the definition of what is a ‘subject’, a ‘self’, or a ‘legal person’. Then, when other people make those distinctions in a different way, you call them ‘pre-modern’. So modernity is always about borders, and what we were trying to do is develop a curatorial ‘frame’ that de-colonizes the imagination, and shows how these borders are implemented and policed, but also how they can be conceived differently. Based on this question of modernity, we try to elaborate in the Taipei Biennial what many people around the globe now perceive as the urgent need to break free from the ‘frame’ of colonial modernity and its narratives, its way of describing the world, and the need to tell different histories of modernity, to break open this modernity question and its notorious self-reproducing mythologies, to re-describe our immediate histories under terms that do not automatically reproduce those ‘borders’. This is part of what we are trying to do with the monster ‘Taowu’ proposed by David (Der-Wei) Wang as a means to write modern Chinese history.(Editor’s note : See Wang Der-Wei, The Monster That Is History. History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China)
Q How did you get to know the work of David Wang ?
A I read a lot of books about the relation between historical experience – especially history about violence – and fiction. Violence is something that is difficult to remember. It destroys memory and cultural continuity itself to a certain degree. These memories come up in fiction. For example, you could say there are many great American novels for the past thirty years. They are not so much the bestsellers but those that take a certain tradition of novel-writing. They deal with American histories of slavery, of racism, etc., things that are very important in the collective memory but very difficult to address, other than through fiction : it’s not about the facts, the dates and so on but the way they form and haunt people in the present that needs to be described through fiction.
This sort of interest in the relation between history and fiction was something that I shared with couple of writers and artists. The task is to read fiction against the grain, not as make-believe, but as a form of documentary of that which escapes positivist historical accounts. In 2006, we have also made an exhibition around the question, it bore the title ‘No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossings Occur at Night’. David Wang’s book was something I came across in this continuous research and interest. Also, I found there is a big need here to analyze and narrate Chinese modernity in its own terms. That is what is so valuable about David Wang’s attempt. He writes a kind of a history that has a certain proximity to Benjamin, Derrida or even Bataille. But he doesn’t use this as a theoretical framework. It’s something that is familiar but it doesn’t imply reading Chinese histories of violence, external and internal colonialism and modernization. Instead, he uses the frame of this ancient mythology. That creates a certain image of the contemporary situation in relation to the past, which is very strong. It’s more about an image created in the imagination. We are not making a biennial about literature but about the imaginary in a wider sense. The idea is to make an exhibition that shifts between fiction and historical analysis, just as the identity, or face of the “monster” in this exhibition constantly changes.
Q Among the artists who will present photographical works in this biennial, we find the Taiwanese photographer Chang Chao-Tang. How do you understand his work ? What works will be shown and how will you present them in the context of this biennial ?
A He is one of the several chroniclers of post-war Taiwan. The amazing thing is that his work covers a period from the late fifties till today. So it’s basically more than half a century. It was important for us to have somebody whose photographic work can mirror a lot of different periods in Taiwan’s history. In his work, there is something that people are familiar with yet you can always find some moments of strangeness particularly in his photographs.
Also, there are periods where he is more experimental. I first knew him through the catalogues of his works. Until I met him personally, I learned that he was a journalist and a reporter. Photography was always a side activity for him. This characteristic of being in-between, not being the sort of artistic photographer per se is interesting. You can sometimes read the images as almost journalistic images and then as totally aesthetic images. What I like in his work is that you can move between these poles of extreme. Then you have this sort of images that are very well-known, like the image of the self-portrait without a head, with just a shadow on the wall. It is an image that allows many possible readings. When he was experimenting photography he was also reading Sartre, so there is all this existentialist influence in it, which is interesting in terms of the global importance Sartre had at the moment. These are the moments when the images of Chang Chao-Tang open themselves to different readings and place Taiwan in such a context. It becomes local again because his images sometimes have this sort of universal look of the ‘Family of Man’ exhibition. I like this movement in his work.
For the Taipei Biennial, we will make a selection of all the five decades. We’re still working on the presentation but basically we will show them in a sort of condensed overview. There would be a lot of images together. What we are thinking about would be more like Peter Brook’s style. Images will be grouped based on their motifs and in blocks. There is no strict chronology but more jumping among motifs, like this movement I just described : making something very specific localized, and this attempt of universalization, this movement between ‘reportage’(Editor’s note : The French term means ‘report’ in English) and aesthetics. We try to make movements between these categories rather than going from 1959 to 2006. But of course, there will be dates connected to all the images.
Q What are other photographic works in the biennial ?
A A part of the photographic works in this biennial is based on archive photos, like the project of Maryam Jafri and that of the Otolith Group. Each of the two projects consists of around fifty images. Maryam Jafri’s project is called ‘Independence Day’. It’s a collection of photographs from the moments of the founding of new states during the period of de-colonization, mainly in the 1960s. When we look at the images today, there is a historical distance of what has happened since. A project like this certainly takes on a very particular reading in Taiwan. We found it interesting to see how meaning changes when the images are being shown today – when we have a slightly different view on the expectations that ‘independence’ carried back then, before the historical experience of neo-colonialism and ‘globalization’. What is also present in these images when presented today is what happened after them – in terms of the histories that ‘power’ has written, but these are stories we normally don’t really know how to tell well. You can’t help but asking yourself in front of these images: What story do I have? Do I have a narrative for the past 50 years, for its aspirations, disappointments and novel monstrosities? And it is interesting to show those images here in Taiwan, with its undecided status.
The Otolith Group’s project in the biennial is called ‘Daughter Products. It’s basically from the family archive of one of the group members. It shows a delegation of Indian women who are communists. You see them in different settings, visiting other countries. It also belongs to this internationalist moment aspiring a different kind of universality that is now largely dead: you see them in China, Russia and also in areas that were not socialist. It is very much complementing the ‘Independence Day’ project of Jafri. It shows another moment of aspiration when a certain scheme of modernity was still working, like the idea of progress, division between the socialist and the capitalist worlds : these are ghosts from the Cold War era that are not quite silent ghosts which are being spoken about in this project.
The biennial will also show Joachim Koester’s work. His work is not so much about what you see, but what you don’t see in this reading. In all his work, he sets up a certain research, like a historical research. Then the research or the story and the image become two components ; there is a tension between what you know, the story you tell and the image you see. For the Taipei Biennial, his research is about opium. One part of the story is trying to find the traces of opium trade in Calcutta which was the main base for the British-East India Company for the opium trade. He found almost nothing except a building called ‘Nanking Restaurant’. You see a photo of this restaurant. Another photo is the poppy flower with which we make opium. Along with the series of images, there goes a text describing the sort of relation between the terror in modernity : the colonial terror or the terror of opium that were part of the history, and its relation to the delirium of smoking opium. What he is interested in is the technology of photography on the one hand and the inscriptions into the mind on the other hand. What are the dreams that you dream under the influence of opium and what is the kind of the shape of dream that has to do with what you see and don’t see in a photograph? The work consists of very few photographs and a text.
As for Luis Jakob, he makes collections of images, like series of collages made with found images, It is called ‘Album’. He has created about ten such ‘Albums’ ; each one consists of about fifty pages. They have certain focuses such as the expressive body. The pages will be shown in a long series on the wall. It’s this kind of catalogue of gestures, but the gestures bring every attempt at classification to its limits – they are ecstatic in a certain sense, and can help us understand the body as a social body, as a collective body. But there is never any specific story. You are left to your own associations and finding different connections between motifs.
Q Today, many artists don’t work solely with one medium. Regarding photography, it is often integrated into installation works or as a means of archiving. For you, what is the role or place of photography in contemporary art ?
A For me, where photograph becomes always interesting in relation to artistic practice is this ambivalence that you can read it as an indexical trace of something, as a sort of document, but also as the exact opposite. The tradition of the latter would be the surrealist magazine called ‘Documents’ (Editor’s note : The original French title means ‘Documents’ in English) founded by Bataille and his friends. Rather than confirming an evidence, the way they used photography reveals to the viewer something in all photography that disturbs the very idea of reality and its ‘order’. It’s always about putting everything into question. Today, many conceptual photographic practices can also be traced back to certain photographic traditions. For example, some people claim that Chang Chao-Tang is conceptual artist. His pictures in the 1970s represent a certain conceptual photography. I still think that there is a lot to explore in terms of this conceptual photography : creating a context for an image and perceiving how the image changes in it. We can think of photography’s role as similar to that of the imagination: it is not to settle and fix the fleeting moment or the imaginary, but to make the settled and fixed strange, and imaginative again. This is where the politics of art is to be found: in the conditions of fixation and change.
(Taipei Biennial 2012: http://www.taipeibiennial.org/2012/2012TB_English.html)
Anselm Franke is an independent curator and freelance writer based in Berlin. He worked in the fields of theater, television and film and has collaborated with Christoph Schlingensief who represented Germany in the Venice Biennale in 2011. As a curator, he worked for KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2001-2006) and was director of Extra City Kunsthal Antwerp (2006-2010) and co-curated Manifesta 7 and the 1st Brussels Biennial. He is the editor of several publications and artist books, and a contributor to e-flux journal. Since 2005, he has been co-curator (along with Stephanie Schulte Strathaus) of the Forum Expanded of the International Film Festival Berlin.
(The interview was first published on http://www.vopmagazine.com/post/31343517867/taipei-biennial-anselm-franke An edited Chinese version was first published on ”Voices of Photography” bi-monthly, August issue 2012, Taiwan.)
From Here.
Interview made on the 22nd July, 2012, in Taipei
by Sylvie Lin
In contemporary art, photographical elements are often integrated into installation works or being used as a means of archiving. VOP interviewed Anselm Franke, curator of the Taipei Biennial 2012 (to be held in September) to talk about the topic of the biennial, ‘Modern Monsters / Death and Life of Fiction’ and specific photographic works that will be shown in the exhibition.
Q Please talk about your past curatorial experiences.
A Originally, I used to work in the fields of theatre, film and television with artist/filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief ; he passed away in 2010 and represented Germany in the Venice Biennale in 2011. From 2003 to 2005, I collaborated with architects in making exhibitions. We didn’t look at the architecture as design but more as planning processes and political geographies. What was important for me in my collaboration with architects is that it is a way to think political questions and the organization of the space. Since 2003, most of the projects I was involved with were collaborations. We shared a common interest in ‘borders’, not only physical borders (of the buildings or the states) but rather social and political borders and borders of the imagination, the way images take part in creating limits. The way we are now trying to use the figure of the monster for the 2012 Taipei Biennial also has to with this interest: the monster is always a limit figure or a liminal figure. There are various forms of monsters, beyond the borders of the human, of the normal, of the laws of reality, etc. Most of these borders and limits appear to us more or less “given” or even natural. The curatorial task is to open up and de-stabilize this understanding, to show how limits are constructed, what is the role of culture, technologies and non-human factors in their making.
Another important experience is that I’ve worked with film for a long time. In 2005, with Stephanie Schulte Strathaus, we founded the Forum Expanded, a section for art and film within the Berlin International Film Festival/Berlinale. Since then, every year, we organized sections on artists’ films, and filmmakers who do installations in the context of the Berlinale.
Q Please talk about your ‘Animism’ project (ref : http://www.extracity.org/en/projects/view/52). Is it connected to the Taipei Biennial 2012 in certain ways ?
A ‘Animism’ was conceived as a project to question the story we tell about modernity. What is modernity? What are normally the sort of images and stories that we connect with this idea? ‘Animism’ used to be a concept used by European anthropologists to describe what was at the opposite of modernity. If you are not modern then you are animist. We used the concept as mirror not to look at the so-called ‘animist’, neither did we intend to make an exhibition ‘about’ animism. Rather, we used the history of the concept to look back at the ideas of those who called others ‘animist’. Again, it’s very much about borders. Because the way European scholars described the animism of peoples in South America, Africa, Siberia, Japan…was always as the absence of the same distinctions that modern people do, such as between a pure subjective inside and an objective nature that follows all the natural laws. In animism, you have a different relationship to things, to nature; you don’t treat them as just “dead matter” that is indifferent to humans. Therefore, it is also about borders: it’s about drawing certain distinctions differently, and this concerns literally everything: everyday experience just as much as the definition of what is a ‘subject’, a ‘self’, or a ‘legal person’. Then, when other people make those distinctions in a different way, you call them ‘pre-modern’. So modernity is always about borders, and what we were trying to do is develop a curatorial ‘frame’ that de-colonizes the imagination, and shows how these borders are implemented and policed, but also how they can be conceived differently. Based on this question of modernity, we try to elaborate in the Taipei Biennial what many people around the globe now perceive as the urgent need to break free from the ‘frame’ of colonial modernity and its narratives, its way of describing the world, and the need to tell different histories of modernity, to break open this modernity question and its notorious self-reproducing mythologies, to re-describe our immediate histories under terms that do not automatically reproduce those ‘borders’. This is part of what we are trying to do with the monster ‘Taowu’ proposed by David (Der-Wei) Wang as a means to write modern Chinese history.(Editor’s note : See Wang Der-Wei, The Monster That Is History. History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China)
Q How did you get to know the work of David Wang ?
A I read a lot of books about the relation between historical experience – especially history about violence – and fiction. Violence is something that is difficult to remember. It destroys memory and cultural continuity itself to a certain degree. These memories come up in fiction. For example, you could say there are many great American novels for the past thirty years. They are not so much the bestsellers but those that take a certain tradition of novel-writing. They deal with American histories of slavery, of racism, etc., things that are very important in the collective memory but very difficult to address, other than through fiction : it’s not about the facts, the dates and so on but the way they form and haunt people in the present that needs to be described through fiction.
This sort of interest in the relation between history and fiction was something that I shared with couple of writers and artists. The task is to read fiction against the grain, not as make-believe, but as a form of documentary of that which escapes positivist historical accounts. In 2006, we have also made an exhibition around the question, it bore the title ‘No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossings Occur at Night’. David Wang’s book was something I came across in this continuous research and interest. Also, I found there is a big need here to analyze and narrate Chinese modernity in its own terms. That is what is so valuable about David Wang’s attempt. He writes a kind of a history that has a certain proximity to Benjamin, Derrida or even Bataille. But he doesn’t use this as a theoretical framework. It’s something that is familiar but it doesn’t imply reading Chinese histories of violence, external and internal colonialism and modernization. Instead, he uses the frame of this ancient mythology. That creates a certain image of the contemporary situation in relation to the past, which is very strong. It’s more about an image created in the imagination. We are not making a biennial about literature but about the imaginary in a wider sense. The idea is to make an exhibition that shifts between fiction and historical analysis, just as the identity, or face of the “monster” in this exhibition constantly changes.
Q Among the artists who will present photographical works in this biennial, we find the Taiwanese photographer Chang Chao-Tang. How do you understand his work ? What works will be shown and how will you present them in the context of this biennial ?
A He is one of the several chroniclers of post-war Taiwan. The amazing thing is that his work covers a period from the late fifties till today. So it’s basically more than half a century. It was important for us to have somebody whose photographic work can mirror a lot of different periods in Taiwan’s history. In his work, there is something that people are familiar with yet you can always find some moments of strangeness particularly in his photographs.
Also, there are periods where he is more experimental. I first knew him through the catalogues of his works. Until I met him personally, I learned that he was a journalist and a reporter. Photography was always a side activity for him. This characteristic of being in-between, not being the sort of artistic photographer per se is interesting. You can sometimes read the images as almost journalistic images and then as totally aesthetic images. What I like in his work is that you can move between these poles of extreme. Then you have this sort of images that are very well-known, like the image of the self-portrait without a head, with just a shadow on the wall. It is an image that allows many possible readings. When he was experimenting photography he was also reading Sartre, so there is all this existentialist influence in it, which is interesting in terms of the global importance Sartre had at the moment. These are the moments when the images of Chang Chao-Tang open themselves to different readings and place Taiwan in such a context. It becomes local again because his images sometimes have this sort of universal look of the ‘Family of Man’ exhibition. I like this movement in his work.
For the Taipei Biennial, we will make a selection of all the five decades. We’re still working on the presentation but basically we will show them in a sort of condensed overview. There would be a lot of images together. What we are thinking about would be more like Peter Brook’s style. Images will be grouped based on their motifs and in blocks. There is no strict chronology but more jumping among motifs, like this movement I just described : making something very specific localized, and this attempt of universalization, this movement between ‘reportage’(Editor’s note : The French term means ‘report’ in English) and aesthetics. We try to make movements between these categories rather than going from 1959 to 2006. But of course, there will be dates connected to all the images.
Q What are other photographic works in the biennial ?
A A part of the photographic works in this biennial is based on archive photos, like the project of Maryam Jafri and that of the Otolith Group. Each of the two projects consists of around fifty images. Maryam Jafri’s project is called ‘Independence Day’. It’s a collection of photographs from the moments of the founding of new states during the period of de-colonization, mainly in the 1960s. When we look at the images today, there is a historical distance of what has happened since. A project like this certainly takes on a very particular reading in Taiwan. We found it interesting to see how meaning changes when the images are being shown today – when we have a slightly different view on the expectations that ‘independence’ carried back then, before the historical experience of neo-colonialism and ‘globalization’. What is also present in these images when presented today is what happened after them – in terms of the histories that ‘power’ has written, but these are stories we normally don’t really know how to tell well. You can’t help but asking yourself in front of these images: What story do I have? Do I have a narrative for the past 50 years, for its aspirations, disappointments and novel monstrosities? And it is interesting to show those images here in Taiwan, with its undecided status.
The Otolith Group’s project in the biennial is called ‘Daughter Products. It’s basically from the family archive of one of the group members. It shows a delegation of Indian women who are communists. You see them in different settings, visiting other countries. It also belongs to this internationalist moment aspiring a different kind of universality that is now largely dead: you see them in China, Russia and also in areas that were not socialist. It is very much complementing the ‘Independence Day’ project of Jafri. It shows another moment of aspiration when a certain scheme of modernity was still working, like the idea of progress, division between the socialist and the capitalist worlds : these are ghosts from the Cold War era that are not quite silent ghosts which are being spoken about in this project.
The biennial will also show Joachim Koester’s work. His work is not so much about what you see, but what you don’t see in this reading. In all his work, he sets up a certain research, like a historical research. Then the research or the story and the image become two components ; there is a tension between what you know, the story you tell and the image you see. For the Taipei Biennial, his research is about opium. One part of the story is trying to find the traces of opium trade in Calcutta which was the main base for the British-East India Company for the opium trade. He found almost nothing except a building called ‘Nanking Restaurant’. You see a photo of this restaurant. Another photo is the poppy flower with which we make opium. Along with the series of images, there goes a text describing the sort of relation between the terror in modernity : the colonial terror or the terror of opium that were part of the history, and its relation to the delirium of smoking opium. What he is interested in is the technology of photography on the one hand and the inscriptions into the mind on the other hand. What are the dreams that you dream under the influence of opium and what is the kind of the shape of dream that has to do with what you see and don’t see in a photograph? The work consists of very few photographs and a text.
As for Luis Jakob, he makes collections of images, like series of collages made with found images, It is called ‘Album’. He has created about ten such ‘Albums’ ; each one consists of about fifty pages. They have certain focuses such as the expressive body. The pages will be shown in a long series on the wall. It’s this kind of catalogue of gestures, but the gestures bring every attempt at classification to its limits – they are ecstatic in a certain sense, and can help us understand the body as a social body, as a collective body. But there is never any specific story. You are left to your own associations and finding different connections between motifs.
Q Today, many artists don’t work solely with one medium. Regarding photography, it is often integrated into installation works or as a means of archiving. For you, what is the role or place of photography in contemporary art ?
A For me, where photograph becomes always interesting in relation to artistic practice is this ambivalence that you can read it as an indexical trace of something, as a sort of document, but also as the exact opposite. The tradition of the latter would be the surrealist magazine called ‘Documents’ (Editor’s note : The original French title means ‘Documents’ in English) founded by Bataille and his friends. Rather than confirming an evidence, the way they used photography reveals to the viewer something in all photography that disturbs the very idea of reality and its ‘order’. It’s always about putting everything into question. Today, many conceptual photographic practices can also be traced back to certain photographic traditions. For example, some people claim that Chang Chao-Tang is conceptual artist. His pictures in the 1970s represent a certain conceptual photography. I still think that there is a lot to explore in terms of this conceptual photography : creating a context for an image and perceiving how the image changes in it. We can think of photography’s role as similar to that of the imagination: it is not to settle and fix the fleeting moment or the imaginary, but to make the settled and fixed strange, and imaginative again. This is where the politics of art is to be found: in the conditions of fixation and change.
(Taipei Biennial 2012: http://www.taipeibiennial.org/2012/2012TB_English.html)
Anselm Franke is an independent curator and freelance writer based in Berlin. He worked in the fields of theater, television and film and has collaborated with Christoph Schlingensief who represented Germany in the Venice Biennale in 2011. As a curator, he worked for KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2001-2006) and was director of Extra City Kunsthal Antwerp (2006-2010) and co-curated Manifesta 7 and the 1st Brussels Biennial. He is the editor of several publications and artist books, and a contributor to e-flux journal. Since 2005, he has been co-curator (along with Stephanie Schulte Strathaus) of the Forum Expanded of the International Film Festival Berlin.
(The interview was first published on http://www.vopmagazine.com/post/31343517867/taipei-biennial-anselm-franke An edited Chinese version was first published on ”Voices of Photography” bi-monthly, August issue 2012, Taiwan.)
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