10th Shanghai Biennale

Under the theme 'SOCIAL FACTORY', the 10th Shanghai Biennale opens on 23 November at China’s foremost state-run institution of contemporary art - Power Station of Art - and runs until 31 March 2015. Chief curator is Anselm Franke. First launched in 1996, the Shanghai Biennale is not only China's most established and influential international biennale of contemporary art, but also one of the most important biennales in Asia. Entitled “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. The 10th Shanghai Biennale Social Factory is curated by Anselm Franke, together with Freya Chou, Cosmin Costinas, Hila Peleg (curator of the film program), Liu Xiao and Zhu Ye (curator of the satellite venues). Music program: Nicholas Bussmann. Curator and writer Anselm Franke is based in Berlin, where he works as Head of Visual Arts at the HKW / House of World Cultures.  Read more about Anselme Franke on e-flux