A few weeks ago, we learned that Cecilia Alemani will serve as the next curator of the Taipei Biennial, one of Asia’s longest-running and most closely watched recurring shows. Alemani, the Italian-born, New York-based director of High Line Art, is best known for “The Milk of Dreams,” her acclaimed 2022 Venice Biennale, which drew more than 800,000 visitors and was the first edition in Venice’s history to feature a majority women artists. More recently, she organized the sprawling SITE Santa Fe International. The 15th Taipei Biennial, organized by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and opening in 2027, will be her first exhibition in Asia. We caught up with her to hear about her early research into Taiwan, the year in biennials and the giant pigeon New Yorkers fought to keep.
The Venice Biennale you curated was one of the most celebrated ever. May I ask your impression of this year’s?
“In Minor Keys” is a truly exciting exhibition that brought together many voices I wasn’t previously familiar with, and that alone made it a remarkable discovery. I found myself moved to explore the work of artists like Seyni Awa Camara, Annalee Davis, Hala Schoukair, Yo-e Ryou and Ayrson Heraclito, for instance. The overall atmosphere was ebullient and generative; it reminded me of the energy one encountered at biennials in the 1990s, a kind of polyphony of voices that felt genuinely plural rather than programmatic. I admire Koyo’s team for realizing her vision with such care and conviction. Some of my most memorable moments were Mohammed Z. Rahaman’s installation—a hypnotic accumulation of small objects that seemed to dissolve the boundary between personal mythology and collective memory; Alice Maher’s work, which has long drawn on folklore, the body, and the darker registers of the natural world; Alvaro Barrington’s truck, an exuberant stage for encounters, Temitayo Ogunbiyi’s exquisitely delicate drawings; and Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film that moved between documentary intimacy and something approaching myth.
I had the privilege of seeing your SITE Santa Fe last year and was blown away by how local it was, incorporating everything from Native American sculpture to the travel diaries of Willa Cather. How do you dig into a region? Have you begun to research Taipei in a similar manner?
Santa Fe and New Mexico are singular places, both geographically, as in-between and border territories, and socially, as regions that have been historically inhabited and continue to be shaped, by resilient Hispanic, Native and so-called “Anglo” communities. Coming from the outside, I wanted to honor these dimensions through an exhibition that could tell those layered stories via the lived experiences of a cast of individuals—present and past, real and fictional—who would serve as both inspiration and driving force for the journeys of contemporary artists. It was also an opportunity to celebrate the extraordinary literary and poetry scene that thrives in New Mexico by inviting writers to animate this cast of characters that anchored the exhibition. For Taipei, I am at the very beginning of my research—but I always try to ensure that an exhibition has a meaningful connection to the cultures and sites that host it, whether through theme, through the artists themselves or through some specific cultural current that characterizes the society in question. Taiwan is a place with an incredibly rich and complex cultural identity, and I want to do that justice.
What are the challenges and opportunities of curating in Taipei?
I am thrilled to be curating my first exhibition in Asia and in Taiwan specifically. I have visited several past editions of the Taipei Biennial and spent time in the city exploring its extraordinary offerings: its museums, its neighborhoods, its energy. My greatest challenge, but also my greatest opportunity, is to make an exhibition that feels urgently relevant to this moment—one that celebrates the remarkable local art scene while engaging with the cultural, social and political conditions of the present. That balance between rootedness and contemporaneity is where I believe exhibitions become truly alive.
At the High Line, you’ve talked about loving the accidental audience, the commuters and truckers and skeptics who didn’t come for art, and you’ve said the encounter in a museum is more prescriptive. A biennial crowd walks in already primed to look. Do you have a preferred mode of working?
I would push back on that a little. I think many of the people who attend biennials—in Venice, and I’m certain in Taipei as well—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 a concentrated few days of celebration. But these are exhibitions that remain on view for months and serve the local community in profound and lasting ways. Some of those encounters can be genuinely life-changing, and as a curator, I always hold multiple audiences in mind simultaneously… the art world, yes, but also the person who wandered in off the street not entirely sure what to expect. That person matters enormously to me.
“The Milk of Dreams” was the first Venice Biennale with a majority of women artists, and at the time, you were careful to say it wasn’t a show about women artists. Four years on, it feels like an emphasis on identity has become the default for big international exhibitions. Why did you choose a subtler messaging for your Venice?
Because I wanted to make a show driven by a thematic journey—the body, metamorphosis, transformation, enchantment—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 vein of “WACK!” or “Radical Women.” What I wanted to demonstrate was that you could make a rigorous, compelling and diverse exhibition—one that might gently shake the foundations of the system—without reducing it to a thesis statement about gender or identity. Some of the artists included would have embraced the feminist label wholeheartedly; others have spent their entire careers resisting being categorized as ‘women artists’ rather than simply as artists. And ultimately, there’s something revealing in the question itself. For decades, the Venice Biennale featured overwhelming majorities of male artists, and no one ever thought to ask ‘Is this a show about male artists?’ The fact that the question only arises when the gender balance shifts tells you everything about the default assumptions still embedded in the field.
One of the three threads of “The Milk of Dreams” was how the body is changing under new technology, the cyborg, the post-human. You were deep in such ideas long before the arrival of artificial intelligence, which constitutes an external brain for most working professionals these days. To what do you attribute this prescience?
I think it was largely born of the pandemic. I curated the entirety of “The Milk of Dreams” under the conditions of the COVID-19 crisis. I couldn’t travel, couldn’t visit artists in their studios, couldn’t do any of the things that ordinarily form the fabric of curatorial practice. Everything was mediated through a screen. And in a strange way, those conversations, conducted over Zoom, Skype, Google Meet and the proliferating new platforms we all suddenly found ourselves on, deeply informed the exhibition. Right 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 sustained entirely through devices—and yet simultaneously held us apart, separated by an invisible digital membrane. That deeply polarizing atmosphere, that sense of technology as both salvation and estrangement, became one of the animating tensions of the show.
More than 5,000 people turned out in pigeon costumes for a National Pigeon Appreciation Day built around Iván Argote’s giant pigeon on the High Line’s Spur, and 7,000 later signed a petition to keep it from being taken down. To what do you attribute this sculpture’s resonance with New Yorkers?
Iván’s sculpture Dinosaur was immediately adopted by New Yorkers, which was both moving and a little astonishing to witness. People have very strong, and often very polarized, feelings about pigeons: you either adore them or you cannot 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 also exists a passionate, dedicated community of pigeon lovers for whom this sculpture became something like a civic totem… a monument in the cityscape that finally acknowledged them. People showed up in full pigeon costume, with live birds carried in their bags; an entire subculture surfaced 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 is precisely what public art should accomplish: create a space where people feel genuinely welcomed, where they can congregate, debate and—crucially—see themselves reflected in the art we commission for these spaces.
What should your fans expect from Taipei?
An open mind, a genuine desire to listen and a real commitment to being transformed by the place. I’m excited to learn, to be surprised, and to make something together.
