Yesterday, the Vancouver Art Gallery announced that it has been asked to be the sole Canadian representative in the Inter-City Pavilions Project of the ninth Shanghai Biennale, which opens October 2.
The Vancouver Art Gallery’s pavilion team, led by curator Daina Augaitis, plans to use the opportunity to present the work of renowned B.C. artist Brian Jungen. The pavilion will feature some of the artist’s signature works, including Prototypes for New Understanding and Cetology—pieces that reflect, the gallery says, the biennial’s theme of “reactivation.”
According to the Shanghai Biennale’s website, the Inter-City Pavilions Project focuses on cities as “metaphorical individuals,” considering the connections and exchanges between people and cultures which, in today’s globalized world, “are more likely to be identified within local communities rather than in national contexts.”
Attendance at the pavilions is predicted to be in the range of 600,000 to 800,000 people.
Vancouver is the only Canadian city represented in the Inter-City Pavilions Project. The 27 other cities include Amsterdam, Auckland, Barcelona, Bogota, Los Angeles, Mumbai, San Francisco and Tehran, among others.
The Inter-City Pavilions Project, supervised by Shanghai Biennale chief curator Qiu Zhijie and co-curators Boris Groys, Jens Hoffman and Johnson Chang Tsong-zung, is new to the biennial this year and runs from October 2 to December 31.
