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The 11th Shanghai Biennale highlights the practices of Asian and South-Asian artists until 12 March at Power Station of Art, China and it is anticipated that the audience will exceed 250,000. Leading the way are Raqs Media Collective a group known to operate in shifting roles, as artists, organisers and provocateurs to reflect the plurality of contemporary life, and art. True to form, their iteration of the biennale embraces riddles, proposals and counter-arguments.
Australian artists who refract and reflect the ‘demand and query’ of the biennale preamble ‘Why Not Ask Again?’ include Ross Manning, Christian Thompson and Azadeh Akhlaghi. In addition, formerly Brisbane, now New Delhi-based writer Tess Maunder has been enlisted as one of four internationals that comprise the curatorial collegiate. Maunder spoke to Art Almanac about her role in the biennale, explaining “The curatorial team believe that art can be an antidote to the inevitability that seems to surround us; it also is a challenge towards the notion that things have to be a certain way. This includes the world at large, some seven billion plus people who intersect only in the imagination, who can create a desire for a different world.”
Authorship, change and uncertainty unite the three practices; Manning creates kinetic images with a data projector, exploring the unfixed state of the image itself. Thompson presents a new series of portrait style photographs in which he holds up placards of the faces of British colonial figures, with the eyes cut out like a mask. Thompson has recently completed a fine art PhD at Oxford, the first Aboriginal Australian to do so. By an eye witness Akhlaghi’s series of digital prints reconstruct unseen murders and deaths in her birth country of Iran. The artist stages ordinary people as actors in extraordinary moments exploring the constructed nature of collective memory and the apparatus that supports it. Interest and reciprocity between Asia and Australian practices is healthy, confirmed Maunder, “more and more Australia is looking towards strengthening its relationships and partnership with its local neighbours in the region, and I think is an urgent practice to maintain, in both the cultural industries and beyond.”
Ross Manning, Dichroic Filter Piece (extended projection), 2013, Projection with dichroic filters. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Queensland
Christian Thompson, Rocks on Your Belly, Conjure by Moon, 2013, photographic prints. Courtesy the artist
