Social Factory — Shanghai Biennial 2014
23 November 2014 - 31 March 2015, Power Station of Art
Titled Social Factory, the 10th Biennale asks what characterizes the production of the social, and how “social facts” are constituted. A recurring point of reference is the year 1978, acknowledged as a turning point in the recent history of modernity. 1978 was also the year in which Deng Xiaoping, who was to become China’s most influential leader in the following decades, initiated his landmark socio-economic reform and opening, re-invoking Mao Zedong’s 1938 exhortation to “seek truth from facts”—a practice that sought to separate accounts of objective reality from subjective imagination. Social Factory contrasts this principle with the call to use fiction as a means of social reform, made by earlier seminal Chinese modernizers, like scholar and journalist Liang Qichao, and China’s seminal social critic and writer Lu Xun, who wrote The Story of Ah Q, Diary of a Madman, among others.
With works by Peter Ablinger, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Carlos Amorales, Edgar Arceneaux, Art & Language, Adam Avikainen, Martin Beck, Neïl Beloufa, Wang Bing, KP Brehmer, Nicholas Bussmann, CAMP (Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran), Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg, Yin-Ju Chen, Chen Chieh-jen, Musquiqui Chihying, Gendun Chopel, Hou Chun-Ming, Tyler Coburn, Joseph Cornell, Peter Dobai, Aleksandra Domanović, Harun Farocki, Loretta Fahrenholz, Peter Friedl, Gao Shiqiang, Zheng Guogu, Tibor Hajas, He Xiangyu, Ho Tzu Nyen, Hu Liu, Huang Ran, Huang Wenhai, Huang Mingchuan, Ken Jacobs, Ji Yunfei, Shambhavi Kaul, Sakai Ko and Hamaguichi Ryusuke, Jutta Koether, Firenze Lai, Louise Lawler, Li Xiaofei, Armin Linke, Liu Ding, Jen Liu, Liu Chuang, Sharon Lockhart, Narimane Mar, Daria Martin, Adrian Melis, Nadia Myre, Pak Sheung Chuen, Willem de Rooij, J.P Sniadecki and Libbie Dina Cohn, Chang Saetang, Natascha Sadr Haghighian / Uwe Schwarzer / Robbie Williams, Song Ta, Erik Steinbrecher, Sun Xun, Sun Yat-sen Project & Yuan Wenshan, Ten Miles Inn / David Crook & Isabel Crook, Suzanne Treister, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Anton Vidokle, Wang Ziyue, Stephen Willats, Ming Wong in collaboration with Thomas Tsang / Dehow Projects, Li Xiuqin, Xu Tan, Yan Jun, Trevor Yeung, Yu Cheng-Ta, Zhao Liang, Zhou Tao, Zhao Yannian and others
Chief curator: Anselm Franke
Co-curators: Freya Chou, Cosmin Costinas, Liu Xiao
Curator for the film program: Hila Peleg
Curator for the music program: Nicholas Bussmann
City Pavilion: Urban Work & Shop
Curator: Zhu Ye
