The biennale that defines itself as a ‘rehearsal’ - a reflective space of performance

The 8th Shanghai Biennale works on the core theme of ‘Rehearsal’, which is wielded against ‘performance’, ‘production’ and ‘discursive practice’. A curatorial note elaborates: “The exhibition not only reformulates/represents everyday life, but also provides a vehicle for its own representative polity. It is the autonomous region of art, within which artists are also legislators. This is surely the most precious legacy of modernism. But why do artists still harbor doubts about exhibitions, even while they crave the opportunity to exhibit? Why are we still somewhat perplexed by artists’ reliance on them?

For artists, the exhibition is fast becoming the primary venue of creativity, hijacking their work and transforming it into something systematized and automated. On the other hand, if art is indeed ‘an everyday practice’, then where is the need for the exhibition? Art as a social activity is a nexus that connects and shares inter-subjective encounters. It therefore aims to pit the group against the public, neighborhood against propaganda, and the mutating quotidian against ‘pop culture’.

So, can the exhibition be considered the battleground for this antagonism? Or on the contrary, is exhibition, as art’s autonomous dominion, merely a theme park of little import trapped in the much larger and more real everyday space of social communication? But the exhibition is not just a space for networking, release or realization. It is primarily a creative space. The paradox of the exhibition lies in the impossible mission of presenting that which cannot be represented. The ‘representation’ that reveals what was previously invisible is not an act of resistance, but rather one of active construction.

Exhibitions are not all about the releasing of works of art, but rather the creation of a scenario. It is exactly here that the exhibition becomes simultaneously theatre and ‘anti-theatre’. The rupture between ‘drama’ and ‘scene’ is where ‘rehearsal’ can be a venue for self-purging and redemption.

‘Rehearsals’ are not formal performances. They are not repeatable and forgettable experiments; rehearsals can turn any social space into a theatre and vice versa. Rehearsing finds itself in the no man’s land between the onstage and offstage, and hence falls into the limbo between theatre and everyday life.

The biennale defines itself as a ‘rehearsal’, as a reflective space of performance. The ‘rehearsal’ of the Shanghai Biennale this year is a self-performative act by the art world, an attempt at self-liberation. For the 8th Shanghai Biennale, what matters is not the exhibition itself, but what it has brought to us in the past year of preparation. What it shows is the dialogues, arguments, thoughts and practices of artists, curators, and thinkers in 2010.