JENNIFER ALLORA & GUILLERMO CALZADILLA, Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech)

Philip Tinari

This past fall, with the consecutive openings of six “Asian biennials,” the deliquescent 1990s and early-2000s trend toward establishing new large-scale exhibitions in increasingly far-flung locales bore fruit, such as it is. And as might have been anticipated, these shows were also attended by the repeatedly aired critiques that such efforts do little more than adapt a late-nineteenth-century model of display to newly ascendant societies; and, further, serve as highbrow smoke screens cynically deployed in the service of nationalist political regimes, neoliberal economic interests, or narrow municipal agendas. But to make either of these points in the present context is to pick up a debate that has, in fact, faded in the years since the first Gwangju Biennale of 1995. Back then, recall, questions about globalization, and about the place of “Asia” (always a problematic concept in and of itself) in this new order, plagued the intelligentsia. Just a short time earlier, economist Ezra Vogel had paternalistically anointed South Korea one of the “four little dragons” driving the region’s economic growth and political progress. Somewhere along the line, though, the “little dragons” (the others were Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore) became the “Asian tigers,” and the terms of the debate shifted away from what 2008 Gwangju Biennale artistic director Okwui Enwezor calls “the anxiety of the periphery.”...>

On The Sixth Taipei Biennial


Burak Delier, Counter Attack: The Intervention Team, 2008.

By Brian Holmes


THE INTERSCALE: Art after Neoliberalism

You enter a typical white cube, with four evenly spaced rectangles on the wall in front of you. One is an ordinary window looking at the world outside. Another is a video monitor with a recording of the view. The two remaining screens oscillate between bright colors – pink, blue, yellow – and scenes of a woman’s hands with polished red fingernails, deliberately cutting out pieces of some black plastic material. There is a soundtrack: ambient bustle, as though you were waiting for an office worker to pick up a dangling phone. Words appear on the screen: So, I just want to know about uncertainty… and knowledge… and if everything can be calculated and known? And now you begin hearing a voice, speaking about mathematical models and what insurance agents do for a living. “The less we know, the higher the risk. Risk always has a price, of course,” explains a specialist. The work, Estimations (2008) by Katya Sander, is a series of disembodied conversations with anonymous interlocutors, about the calculability of disaster and its uncertainties.1...>

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