Highlights from the Second Yinchuan Biennale
By Tom Mouna
The Second Yinchuan Biennale took place in the Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan. Situated on the outskirts of the city, the museum is one of the westernmost contemporary art museums in China. All photos by Tom Mouna for
The Second Yinchuan Biennale, “Starting from the Desert: Ecologies on the Edge,” opened on June 9, 2018, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan. The international curatorial team was led by renowned Italian curator Marco Scotini, and included Andris Brinkmanis, Paolo Caffoni, Zasha Colah and Lu Xinghua. Working with the term “group-being,” the curators moved to localize the biennale, anchoring it to the city of Yinchuan, the capital of China’s Northwest Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, close to the Gobi Desert—historically a key junction of the Silk Road trading route, and currently home to a large Hui minority and Muslim population—through a focus on concepts like nomadism, minorities and ecology. Using the city’s liminality to open up radical and proliferating questions and theoretical positions, the curatorial team was explicit, both in the guidebook and their opening speech, in their reference to Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts, especially on rhizomes and their “Nomad Science,” as the conceptual frameworks of their endeavors.
