The Taipei Biennial has named philosopher Bruno Latour and independent curator Martin Guinard-Terrin as the curators for its 2020 edition. The twelfth edition is slated to open in October of next year and “will further probe into the geo-political and geo-historical issues based on the curatorial dialogue of the eleventh edition, in hopes of opening discussions on how to establish a foothold on this land.” 

Latour was called “France’s most famous and misunderstood philosopher” in Ava Kofman’s New York Times Magazine profile last year. His considerations of reality and truth explore how facts are socially networked—the greater the number of people, institutions, and things involved in the production of a fact’s veracity, the more difficult it is to refute its truth value. His recent books include Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Polity, 2018); Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climactic Regime (Polity, 2017); and We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press, 1993), perhaps his best-known work. He is a professor at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Germany, and a fellow at Karlsruhe’s Zentrum für Kunst und Media (ZKM).

Guinard-Terrin studied at Concordia University and McGill University in Canada and at Central Saint Martins in England and has worked at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was cocurator of “Reset Modernity!” at ZKM, in collaboration with Latour.

This marks the first curatorial announcement of the fair before the end of the current one, a decision spurred by the hope that it will allow for more collaboration, support, and experimentation for the curators, according to Taipei Fine Arts Museum director Ping Lin. This year’s biennial, “Post-Nature—A Museum as an Ecosystem,” was curated by Francesco Manacorda and Mali Wu. It opened in November and closes on Sunday, March 10.