Reflecting on the relations between individual creativity and the public domain

The theme exhibition of the Shanghai Biennale 2010, entitled Rehearsal’ is on view at Shanghai Art Museum. Focusing on the narrative capacity and site-specificity of contemporary art, it conjures an inter-media theatre, reflecting on time, virtuality and experience.

Performance and intensive interaction among media and formats run in parallel, activating multiple images of time and to spatializing the time experience of the audience. The audience may walk from scene to scene, following an integral narrative context constituted of work from different artists. These ‘biennale scenes’, engaging in memory, maneuvering and construction, present an emotional field with a quirky twist. In this sense, the ‘rehearsal’ of the 8th Shanghai Biennale could be transcendental adventures along the wandering roads between the performance and its stage.

As the Interlude program of the Biennale, the curators have invited the active practitioners in Chinese live art to transform the documentary exhibition ‘The Past Decade of Chinese Live Art’ into a site of performativity in open dialogue with history. What is the VENUE? What is the PERFORMANCE? What is the THEATRE? What is the AUDIENCE? What is SOCIAL PARTICIPATION? What is HISTORY? What is MEMORY? What is REHEARSAL? Though the five Acts, it brings together around 80 thinkers, artists and curators in an attempt to bring about a convergence of discourse and visual production.

What the Biennale aims to achieve is to invite a wide range of participants – artists, curators, critics, collectors, museum directors, and members of the audience – a to rehearse in the Biennale, a fertile theatre to reflect on the relations between art experimentation and the art system, between individual creativity and the public domain.

The biennale defines itself as a ‘rehearsal’, as a reflective space of performance. The ‘rehearsal’ of the 8th Shanghai Biennale is a self-performative act by the art world, a wake up call to itself and an attempt at self-liberation. Rehearsal is wielded against ‘performance’, ‘production’ and ‘discursive practice’. The responsibility of the curators is to differentiate, organize and then mobilize. 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 the rehearsal shows is the dialogues, arguments, thoughts and practices of artists, curators, and thinkers in 2010.