A few weeks ago we learned this Cecilia Alemani will serve as the next curator of the Taipei Biennale, one of the longest-running and most-attended recurring shows in Asia. Alemani, the New York-born Italian director of High Line Art, is best known for “The milk of dreams“Her acclaimed 2022 Venice Biennale, which attracted more than 800,000 visitors and was the first edition in Venice’s history to feature a majority of women artists. Recently, she organized the extensive PAGE Santa Fe International. The 15th Taipei Biennale, organized by the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts and opening in 2027, will be its first exhibition in Asia. We caught up with her to hear about her early research in Taiwan, her year at the biennale and the giant pigeon New Yorkers fought to keep.
The Venice Biennale you curated was one of the most famous ever. May I ask your impression of this year?
“In minor keys“it’s a really exciting exhibition that brought together a lot of voices that I wasn’t familiar with before, and that alone made it an incredible discovery. I felt excited to explore the work of artists like Seyni Awa Camara, Annalee Davis, Hala Schoukair, Yo-e Ryou and Ayrson Heraclito, for example. The general atmosphere was fiery and generative; it reminded me of the energy encountered at the biennales of the 1990s, a kind of polyphony of voices that felt truly plural rather than programmatic. I admire the Koyo team for realizing its vision with such care and conviction. Some of my most memorable moments were Mohammed Mr. Rahaman‘s installation—a hypnotic assemblage of small objects that seemed to blur the line between personal mythology and collective memory; Alice Maherhis work, which has long relied on folklore, the body, and the darker registers of the natural world; Alvaro Barringtonhis truck, an abundant dating scene, Temitayo Ogunbiyihis extremely delicate drawings; AND Mr. Andrew Nguyen‘s film that moved between documentary intimacy and something approaching myth.
I had the privilege of seeing your SITE in Santa Fe last year and was blown away by how local it was, including everything from Native American sculpture to Willa Cather’s travel diaries. How do you dig into a region? Have you started exploring Taipei in a similar way?
Santa Fe and New Mexico are distinct places, both geographically, as in-between and borderlands, and socially, as regions that have historically been inhabited, and continue to be formed, by resilient Hispanic, Native, and so-called “Anglo” communities. Coming from abroad, I wanted to honor these dimensions through an exhibition that could tell those stories layered through the lived experiences of a cast of individuals – present and past, real and fictional – who would serve as inspiration and driving force for the journeys of contemporary artists. It was also an opportunity to celebrate the incredible literary and poetry scene that thrives in New Mexico by inviting writers to animate this cast of characters that anchored the exhibit. For Taipei, I am at the beginning of my research – but I always try to ensure that an exhibition has a meaningful connection with the cultures and places that host it, whether through the theme, through the artists themselves or through some specific cultural current that characterizes the society in question. Taiwan is a country with an incredibly rich and complex cultural identity, and I want to do it justice.
What are the challenges and opportunities of curation in Taipei?
I am excited to be curating my first exhibition in Asia and in Taiwan in particular. I’ve visited several past editions of the Taipei Biennale and spent time in the city exploring its incredible offerings: its museums, its neighborhoods, its energy. My biggest challenge, but also my biggest opportunity, is to make an exhibition that feels urgently relevant to this moment – an exhibition that celebrates the wonderful local art scene while engaging with the cultural, social and political conditions of the present. That balance between the rooted and the contemporary is where I believe the exhibits really come alive.
On the High Line, you talked about the love of the accidental audience, the commuters and truckers and skeptics who didn’t come for the art, and you said that the encounter in a museum is more commanding. A two-year-old crowd enters already primed to watch. Do you have a favorite way of working?
I would push that a bit. I think that many of the people who attend biennales – in Venice, and I’m sure in Taipei too – are “regular” people: curious individuals, families, schoolchildren and young students encountering contemporary art for the first time. We in the art world tend to experience these major exhibitions during their opening weeks, when the professional circuit descends for several days of concentrated celebration. But these are exhibits that stay open for months and serve the local community in profound and lasting ways. Some of those encounters can be truly life-changing, and as a curator, I always have multiple audiences in mind at the same time… the art world, yes, but also the person wandering off the street unsure of what to expect. That person means a lot to me.
“Dream Milk” was the first Venice Biennale with a majority of female artists, and at the time, it was careful to say that it was not a show for female artists. Four years later, it seems that the emphasis on identity has become the standard for major international exhibitions. Why did you choose a more subtle message for your Venice?
Because I wanted to make a show driven by a thematic journey – the body, metamorphosis, transformation, glamor – that happened to feature a majority of women and gender non-conforming artists. It was not an exhibition about women, nor a historical survey of feminist practice in the work of “WACK!” or “Radical Women”. What I wanted to demonstrate was that you could make a rigorous, compelling, and diverse exhibition—one that could gently shake the foundations of the system—without reducing it to a thesis statement about gender or identity. Some of the artists involved would have wholeheartedly embraced the feminist label; others have spent their entire careers resisting being categorized as ‘women artists’ rather than simply artists. And after all, there is something revealing in the question itself. For decades, the Venice Biennale featured an overwhelming majority of male artists, and no one thought to ask “Is this a show for male artists?” The fact that the question only arises when the gender balance changes tells you everything about the default assumptions still embedded in the field.
One of the three themes of “Dream Milk” was how the body is changing under new technology, the cyborg, the post-human. You were deep in such ideas long before the advent of artificial intelligence, which constitutes an external brain for most working professionals these days. To whom do you attribute this consciousness?
I think it was mainly born out of the pandemic. I curated the entirety of “Dream Milk” during the COVID-19 crisis. I couldn’t travel, I couldn’t visit artists in their studios, I couldn’t do any of the things that usually form the structure of curatorial practice. Everything was mediated through a screen. And in a strange way, those conversations, conducted via Zoom, Skype, Google Meet, and the growing new platforms we all suddenly found ourselves on, deeply informed the exhibition. Just before the pandemic, we were living through a moment in which technology seemed to promise the possibility of eternal life or radical self-improvement, while at the same time, the specter of total automation loomed over entire economies and ways of being. During the pandemic, technology kept us connected—families supported entirely through devices—and yet at the same time kept us apart, separated by an invisible digital membrane. That deeply polarizing atmosphere, that sense of technology as salvation and alienation, became one of the show’s animating tensions.
More than 5,000 people turned out in pigeon costumes for the National Pigeon Appreciation Day built around Ivan Argotethe High Line’s Spur giant pigeon and 7,000 later signed a petition to keep it from being removed. To what do you attribute this sculpture’s resonance with New Yorkers?
Ivan’s sculpture Dinosaur it was immediately adopted by New Yorkers, which was both touching and a little surprising to witness. People have very strong and often very polarized feelings about pigeons: you either love them or you can’t stand them. But what made this work so powerful was how many people identified with it. The pigeon is in many ways the unofficial symbol of New York, but there is also a passionate and dedicated community of pigeon fanciers for whom this sculpture became something of a civic totem… a monument in the cityscape that finally recognized them. People appeared in full pigeon costume, with live birds carried in their bags; an entire subculture emerged and gathered, drawn to the High Line as an open, welcoming public space without the institutional weight or potential intimidation of a museum. And I think that’s exactly what public art should achieve: to create a space where people feel really welcome, where they can gather, debate and – crucially – see themselves reflected in the art that we commission for these spaces.
What should your fans expect from Taipei?
An open mind, a genuine desire to listen and a genuine commitment to transform the country. I’m excited to learn, to be surprised, and to do something together.
More interviews on the Arts
