chief editors corinne diserens

　　The Taipei Biennial 2016 "Gestures and archives of the present, genealogies of the future" presents 5-month-long exhibitions, performances, screenings, symposiums, conferences, and workshops. This exhibition explores new notions of gesture, translation, appropriation, genealogy, and the pleasurable to foster the invention of an unpredictable common, at a time of universal privatization of the human and nonhuman Earth, and deprivation of the world's "commons." In ancient Greece, the "archive" was the place where those who held political power decided which public documents were to be filed. They thus held a power of legitimating decision-making as to what would be kept or destroyed. Evoking anthropologist David Graeber's book, Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, the biennial aims to contribute to the critique of institutional bureaucracy and its structural violence so that radical thought does not lose its vital center and its ability to disarm configurations of power, thereby unlocking human imagination out of dead zones to explore heterogeneous narratives and allow common memory to disseminate and settle. QR code of exhibition guidebook, including artworks, performances, screenings, and conferences, is provided in this publication on P5.