Noah's Ark in the Bible carries animals, plants, and humans. In the contemporary era, we have the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. However, art is often absent in the Ark of Civilization. In this exhibition room, we attempt to present the various possibilities and appearances of art.
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Foundation
Our planet has experienced countless events of destruction and rebirth in the span of 4.6 billion years. If the demise of mankind has a certain inevitability and cycle, and art has often become a victim of historical crises, does art have the guarantee of a gene pool? In the movie Children of Men, the exile of artworks is probably our likely future.
At the beginning of human civilization, art was often used as a source of prophecy or knowledge. This tradition is also obvious in present-day contemporary art. If "prophecy" often appears in the form of art, we assume that people projected their modern-day anxieties into its creation, achieving the imaginary in real life, and, thus, creating what is seen as a prediction of the future. Art serves to convey the possibility of the future through different artistic languages, to vaccinate mankind before the advent of the end times. After the destruction, it provided a fragmented jigsaw for later generations to return to the crest of civilization.
'Foundation' borrows its title from the American writer Isaac Asimov's book series. In the novel, Asimov foresaw the tragic future of mankind, which sets up the Foundation whose stated goal is to compile a text, called the Encyclopaedia, containing the sum total of all knowledge of the Galactic Empire. In preserving their society's knowledge, they hope to avert a dark age lasting tens of thousands of years following the Empire's collapse. Human beings under the current epidemic are also facing struggles, but how should the seeds of art be dealt with? At the same time, if darkness is bound to come, how prepared are we? What should we do more?
For the 2021 edition of Art Taipei, we have divided the exhibition into three areas for discussion, aim to examine three different topics, and shall present each topic individually in three different spaces, in which art as the "Foundation" of the dialogue will stand. We attempt to imagine the existence and possibility of art in the Foundation when the end is coming.
Participating Artists｜
Karina Akopyan
Peihang Benoit
Luís Carita
Chang Ting-Tong
Chen Wei-Chen
Chen Yu-Erh
Chiu Huai-Hsuan
Toni Hamel
Hasuwa Tomoko
Hirako Yuichi
Hou Chen-Lu
Hanna Ilczyszyn
Harold Linker
Hsiao Sheng-Chien
IShiyama Tetsuya
Lai Wei-Yu
Laura Limbourg
Maru Quiñonero
Nakayashiki Tomonari
Ong Hong-Chuan
Lua Rivera Figueroa
Shih Yung-Chun
Shimada So
Shindo Kyoko
Xevi Solà Serra
Jan Soumar
Mònica Subidé
Daniel Sueiras Fanjul
Sun Pei-Mao
Wang Guan-Jhen
Yuan Hsin-Yuan
