Overview

Organizer: Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Curator: Anselm Franke

The Taipei Biennial 2012 delves into the concept of the Taowu, an ancient Chinese monster, and its connection to history. It explores how this creature came to represent humanity’s inability to control and understand history, becoming a blind spot in historical reasoning. The Biennial suggests that the Taowu is a shared experience in modernity, embodying the perpetuation of violence and brutality in the pursuit of enlightenment and rationality. Rather than focusing on the spectacle of monstrosity, the exhibition employs dialectic strategies to expose and disarm the anonymous and systemic monstrosity of modernity. It highlights how fiction reveals the hidden aspects of historical and documentary accounts, uncovering the systemic terror underlying modernity’s promises of liberation. The Taowu is portrayed as a shape-shifting entity, representing the lives and deaths of fiction within the mythological condition of modernity. The Biennial engages in re-narrating modern histories through various contributions and mini-museums, blurring the lines between documents and fictionalizations. This creates a montage where the figure of the monster assumes ever-changing identities, akin to the perception-altering “multi-stable figures” where the relationship between the figure and background can be reversed.

During the Taipei Biennial 2012, Avikunthak presented his film Vakrantunda Swaha. The film became a requiem for Avikunthak’s deceased friend. It stages the rite of passage that allowed the dead artist to enter into the other world. The film develops as a dreamlike sequence of scenes that confuse good and evil, fiction and reality.

“Modern Monsters/Death and Life of Fiction.” Taipei Biennial, 2012. https://www.taipeibiennial.org/2012/en/tb2012.html