Philippe Vergne

Hanru Hou

Vasif Kortun

"The rise of globalism has created tremendous challenges to old economic, political, and cultural paradigms, and these changes are reflected in artistic practices. Disciplinary boundaries are crossed as easily as geographical ones. How does the new internationalism that we are facing affect aesthetics and artistic production? Is there a link, for example, between the rise of video works and the global availability of the digital medium? Does the global information age facilitate an 'international language of art' and an alternative reading of art history, toward art histories? From the perspective of a museum of modern and contemporary art, the institution has to overcome a majore contradiction between its mission of permanence and its mission of change. How can cultural institutions contribute to the revamping of their own structures now that the hegemony of Western modernity is being challenged? How can museums connect with new audiences through different practices, different scholarship, and different interpretative strategies growing out of the sedimentation of their histories? To invite and encourage such dialogue, 'How latitudes become forms : art in a global age' looks at current scholarship on globalism and changing curatorial practices, and identifies critical models provided by artists themselves. This catalogue features thought-provoking essays and conversations by curators, critics, and cultural programmers from across the world as well as the multidisciplinary artworks of more than forty visual, film/video, performing, and new media artists from Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States." -- book cover.

Art in a Global Age

How Latitudes Become Forms

Ute Meta Bauer

The rise in biennials worldwide over the past three decades--and most notably in Asia--provokes a shift away from the traditional centers of contemporary art and signifies a new cultural phenomenon that changes the way we understand the relationship between artistic creation, institutions, localities, and social relations. Biennials provide a platform for presenting contemporary art from the world over to a traveling group of art professionals, but more importantly to a wide public. Initiated by the Biennial Foundation and hosted by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation in South Korea, the inaugural World Biennial Forum investigated this multiplicity of new centers and gravities along with the heterogeneous practices in large-scale art shows today. This publication collects the presentations and discussions developed during the forum. Keynotes by eminent intellectuals on democracy, aesthetic representation, and cosmopolitanism help us conceive of biennials as an alternative space of political imagination. Case studies with a focus on Asia examine innovative and contextually relevant models of presentations of this kind in the Asia Pacific region. The contributions look back to the history of biennials, or investigate contemporary art's relationship with other disciplines. Biennials featured (selection):Anyang Public Art Project, Biennale of Sydney, Chobi Mela, Emergency Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, Mediacity Seoul, Shanghai Biennale, Taipei Biennial, Tbilisi Triennial, Yokohama Triennial

Shifting Gravity

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hou Hanru

Wiener Secession

In today's world, the Asian megapolis is a reality that is reconfiguring both East and West, old world and new, and is as much a cultural phenomena as a demographic or architectural one. It is currently predicted that in the year 2000 there will be 15 cities in Asia with more than 15 million people each, and that more than 50 million will be living in the Tokyo-Osaka corridor. Cities on the Move is the first publication to confront this rapidly changing social, urban, and suburban landscape primarily from the point of view of those Asian artists, architects, and intellectuals who are currently already part of this emerging world. The result is a massive, kaleidoscopic volume which presents a multitude and variety of projects, plans, ideas, artworks, and observations which are not easily summarized. Like a documenta of the East, this book attempts nothing less than an expansive, inclusive forum and interchange -- an avant-garde symposium -- for those figures whose work by its very nature requires the contemplation of urban Asia.

Hanru Hou

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