art to create new realities

The Shanghai Biennale was held for the first time in 1996 and in 2000 it opened internationally with the presence of artists and curators from other latitudes. For the city, it is an event of great importance and, therefore, several regions of the city participate in the 13th edition of the event. In total they are 64 artists from 18 nationalities this land in Shanghai among which we count up to 33 projects carried out specifically for the occasion. The main exhibition Bodies of wateropens this Saturday at Power Station of Art with works by artists such as Ana Mendieta, Cecilia Vicuña, Pepe Espaliú, Itziar Okariz, Antoni Muntadas, Carlos Irijalba, Joan Jonas or Cooking Sections.

Architect Andrés Jaque is the chief curator of this event in which he collaborated with curators Marina Otero Verzier, You Mi, Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos. “This biennale, instead of starting with the opening of an exhibition followed by a public program, began with five days of work and discussion.” In those early days, artists, activists, scientists and in general the city of Shanghai “interacted, reacting, inhabiting and reconstructing the focus of the biennale”. Later, the appointment infiltrated the city's life and infrastructures such as the metro, where they occupied their screens, in five art faculties; or on the television channel Docu TV and its expansion through the international network Dragon TV, for which the biennial developed a series of documentaries.

In this third phase, the inauguration Bodies of watera collective exhibition that dialogues with the history and geography of the city. Although the main space is the Power Station of Art (PSA), a former coal-fired power station that promoted the industrialization of the Huangpu River, it also expands to other spaces such as the Sunke Villa, one of the historical remains of colonial control of the environment. Shanghai, created from the drying out of its original swamp ecosystem, and the former building of the Commercial Printing Factory, a publishing house that printed the school textbooks used to unify knowledge across the country.

For Jaque, one of the most important focuses of this biennial is “understanding the way in which art not only changes what you see, but also how you feel and how you feel collectively”. In this sense, the work of plastic artist Carlos Casas stands out, who in the PSA chimney “has worked with great technological sophistication to recreate the physical vibrations that occurred during the eruption of the Kracatoa volcano, in Indonesia”. The environment is, without a doubt, one of the major concerns of many artists and activists, but also of society in general, and the Shanghai Biennale proposes that we reflect on this. “I don’t think we have the option of not being environmental right now,” says Jaque. The environmental crisis and the pandemic are two of the issues of an era “marked by climate and the environment. The important thing is how this paradigm manifests itself and is constructed in the biennial. And I think that shows that being ecological means being queerfeminist and transhuman; and vice versa”, he argues. For the biennial, all forms of life are interconnected and interdependent, so Bodies of water urges us to examine it carefully. Furthermore, it is an issue closely linked to the city itself, which suffered a drop of 5,000 meters into the East China Sea due to meltwater from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

However, Jaque does not believe that art reflects on the planet, “but that it produces the planet”. , these realities exist by themselves, “not as subsidiaries of others”. “Art does not illustrate, explain, or reflect. Create reality”. For the exhibition, the curatorial team selected works from the 70s and 80s, such as Feliciano Centurión's embroidery, Ana Mendieta's silhouettes, Guo Fengji's monsters or the loading by Pepe Espaliú “because they are living testimonies of how in moments of great crisis they all had the ability to reinvent the space in which bodies compete as part of collective realities”, explains Jaque. Current artists such as Zadie Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo, Nerea Calvillo, Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun work in the same vein.

Among the participating artists Bodies of water we can find several Spanish names such as the collective Debajo del sombrero, Carlos Irijalba, Antoni Muntadas, Nerea Calvillo or Benito Mayor Vallejo. Although everyone presented interesting projects for the biennial, Jaque does not like to talk “about nationality because the demarcations in which life takes place have little to do with these administrative categories”. Finally, this edition of The Shanghai Biennale “champions the important contribution that art plays in rebuilding a world marked by environmental, social and political anguish. The Biennale is sensitive to the way art constitutes and infiltrates life itself and its capacities for bodily repair, transformation and dissent.”

@scamarzana