Co-curated by Mali Wu and Francesco Manacorda, the 11th Taipei Biennial sought to address the urgent environmental conversations of the 21st century, via an experimental exhibition model based on an interconnected, osmotic ecosystem. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum was transformed into a platform for discussion and collaboration, with participatory exhibits and workshops seeking to generate long-lasting, community-driven, bottom-up ideas and solutions. Recognising that ecological change can only be achieved through interdisciplinary working, its 35 participants and collectives included artists, as well as NGOs, activists, film and documentary makers, architects and scientists. Rather than simply address ecological issues inside a museum, the biennial’s projects extended outside and online, attempting to develop international environmental consciousness and embed this as a common way of thinking.

 

“Martha Atienza’s mesmerizing Our Islands 11°16’58.4”N 123°45’07.0”E , 2017, staged an underwater version of a parade that takes place each January on Bantayan Island in the Philippines. Commemorating Santo Niño (Jesus Child), that annual procession serves as a sort of spiritual exorcism for the participants, who develop outrageous costumes and characters to portray and critique social ills. To stage this undersea version, Atienza collaborated with some of these same participants, many of whom are divers. The result is a surreal portrait of the Philippine media’s various contemporary fixations: gun-toting police running down a man with a DRUG LORD sign; survivors of Super Typhoon Yolanda; and emigrating female workers bearing suitcases (the Philippines has one of the highest populations of emigrant workers in the world, many of them middle-aged women).” - ArtForum

 

“The works providing active ecosystems include Danish artist Tue Greenfort’s sculptural mushroom cultivators and Taiwan-based Chen Chu-Yin’s terrarium of light-activated robotic insects. Mycelium Network Society (2018), by an international collaborative of the same name, is a room-size molecular model of the fungal toxin Patulin. Each “atom” houses fungi and radio transmitters that convert the growth of the organism into sound. On opening night musicians improvised with the fungi.” – Art in America

 

“Pteridophilia, an erotically charged series of videos by Zheng Bo, is inspired by the move many Japanese artists made to Taiwan in the early 20th century, some of whom were seduced by the island's luscious tropical flowers. Obliquely drawing on Taiwan's colonial past, Zheng Bo's films depict naked young men interacting with ferns in a forest; fondling, rubbing, touching, licking, and caressing leaves.” – Ocula