Host: Glamour Bar

Address: 6/F, No.5 The Bund (corner of Guangdong Lu), Shanghai

Date: October 1st 2012 , 18:00

Participants: Zheng Shengtian, Marko Daniel, Biljana Ciric

Price: 75RMB (drinks included)

Event will be conducted in Chinese and English

Institution for the Future is an archive of ideas bringing together reflections by artists, curators, and other cultural workers on what an institution for the future should and needs to look like.

The need to evolve our ways of working has always been necessary. In light of the drastic changes to the structure of the art world over the last decade and the wider socio-political and economic challenges we are facing, the need to reconsider our modes of operating to find alternatives seems more pressing than ever. How might we see beyond the current and develop institutional models that function in an unknown future?

Through pondering what an institution for the future might look like the contributors explore a rich array of questions including what the relationship between an institution and artists should be, the possibilities for institutions and activism, an institution’s frame of reference and how it should connect to local and international contexts, the role of an institution in research and knowledge production, an institution’s relationship to the temporal as well as spatial, and an institution as a way of being.

Book contributions include drawings, critical texts, informal correspondence, found text, hypothetical proposals, interviews and diagrammatic explorations by:

Ade Darmawan (ruangrupa), Alistair Hudson (Grizedale Arts), Dmitry Vilensky (chto delat), Dorothea von Hantelmann, Elaine W. Ho, Gerald Raunig, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hu Xiangqian, Ho Tzu Nyen, Jens Hoffmann, Joăo Ribas, Jun Yang, Keren Cytter, Liu Ding, Marina Abramović, Michael Lee, Monika Szewczyk, Nikita Cai, Richard Streitmatter-Tran, Roslisham Ismail aka Ise, Sam Bower (Green Museum), Seng Yujin, Third Belgrade, Tino Sehgal, Vandy Rattana and Yoko Ono.

Edited by: Biljana Ciric and Sally Lai

Editorial adviser: Alexandra Hodby

Designed by: Lu Pingyuan and He Yiming

Language: English

Published by: Chinese Art Centre (www.chinese-arts-centre.org)

ISBN: 978-0-9545440-5-8

Distributed by Cornerhouse Publications (www.cornerhouse.org/books)

Supported by: Arts Council England, dia/projects, Ho Chi Minh City

Book launch in Shanghai will be presented in collaboration with the publication of the September/October 2012 issue of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art with the same title Institution for the Future.

This special issue is guest edited by Biljana Ciric and explores the art systems and artist-initiated projects as they have evolved in mainland China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Signapore, Thailand, and India. Texts contributed by Biljana Ciric, Nikita Yingqian Cai, Patrick D. Flores, Sanjay Ghosh, Nur Hanim Khairudden, Carol Lu, Narawan Pathomvat, Richard Streitmatter-Tran, and Eugene Tan.

Institution for the Future is now a topic more important than ever and this special issue of Yishu provides a perspective from a particular region of the world that has comparatively little infrastructure in place yet is in an opportunistic position to explore and provide new and innovative ideas about the ways that artists can function in society.

While Yishu is a publication devoted to contemporary Chinese art, it is also interested in discussing China in relation to other parts of the world. Most often, that discussion takes place in respect to the West, but, with Institution of the Future, China will be explored in the context of its neighbouring nations.

Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Volume 11 No. 5 (http://yishu-online.com)

Guest Editor: Biljana Ciric

Designer: Leap Creative, Vancouver

Publisher: ARTCO, Taipei

Language: English

The September/October edition of Yishu shares the same title as the exhibition Institution for the Future, which was presented as part of the Asia Triennial Manchester, 2011, curated by Biljana Ciric and Chinese Art Centre. Institution for the Future showcased artists’ collectives and small, independent, para-institutions from various Asian countries who are actively engaged with their local arts scenes and who attempt to contribute to the development of an arts infrastructure in their regions.

For further information, please email: info@chinese-arts-centre.org or takingthestageover@gmail.com

About the participants:

Zheng Shengtian is a scholar, artist, and independent curator. For more than thirty years, he worked at China Academy of Art in Hangzhou as Professor and Chair of the Oil Painting Department. He was the co-founder of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and currently is the Managing Editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and a trustee of Vancouver Art Gallery. He has been a member of the Academic Committee for the Shanghai Biennale since 1998 and was a co-curator of the 4th Shanghai Biennale in 2004. He has organized numerous exhibitions, including Shanghai Modern at Villa Stuck, Munich, Art and China’s Revolution at Asia Society Museum, New York in 2009. He is the Senior Curator of Asia for Vancouver Biennale and is a frequent contributor to periodicals and catalogues about contemporary Chinese and Asian art. As an artist, his art work has been showing in China, United States and Canada since 1960s.

Marko Daniel is Convenor of Adult Programmes (Tate Modern and Tate Britain, since January 2011) and was Curator of Public Programmes at Tate Modern from May 2006. He was co-curator of Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape (Tate Modern, April-September 2011, then Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona and National Gallery of Art, Washington) and curator of a solo-show by Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen at Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester (October-November 2010). He also contributed to the catalogue for Ai Weiwei’s exhibition Sunflower Seeds (Tate Modern, 2010-2011). He is Vice-Chair of the London Consortium, a unique collaboration between the Architectural Association, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Science Museum, Birkbeck College and Tate that offers interdisciplinary research programmes (Ph.D. and M.Res.) in the humanities.

Biljana Ciric currently lives and works in Shanghai, China as an independent curator. Previously she has held positions as curator and subsequently the Director of the Curatorial Department at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. Her ongoing project, Migration Addicts, was presented in the Collateral Events of the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 and in the Shenzhen/Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in 2008. Other exhibitions include Strategies from Within – Contemporary Art Practices in Vietnam and Cambodia at Ke Center of Contemporary Arts (2008); a major retrospective of Yoko Ono entitled Yoko Ono-Fly, co-curated with Gunnar Kvaran at Ke Center for Contemporary Art and at the Guangdong Museum of Art (2008); Contemporaneity –Contemporary Art of Indonesia presented at Shanghai’s MoCA (2010); and Body as a Museum at Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm (2010).

Ciric was the curator of the public art project, Intrude 366 in 2008 and curated History in the Making: Shanghai 1979-2009, 30 Years Retrospective of Shanghai Contemporary Culture in 2009. She also initiated the one-year project, Taking the Stage OVER, an ongoing investigation of the performative impulse in art in venues throughout Shanghai and Beijing, which focused on works of Bestue Vives, Tino Sehgal, Antti Laitinen, Keren Cytter among others. She was the curator of Institution for the Future as part of the Asia Triennial Manchester, 2011.