An ambitious new biennial featuring works by Ai Weiwei and Anish Kapoor is due to launch in northwest China later this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan (Moca Yinchuan). The curator of the inaugural edition, entitled For an Image, Faster than Light (9 September-18 December), is the Indian artist Bose Krishnamachari who co-founded the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala in 2012.
The inaugural biennial will include more than 80 international artists including Abigail Reynolds, Lala Rukh, Newsha Tavakolian, Santiago Sierra, as well as Chinese practitioners such as Song Dong and Liu Wei. Several artists will create site-specific works, while a residency programme linked to the biennial will run at Moca Yinchuan’s international artists’ village.
The artists represent “all facets of the global spectrum… working on contemporary issues that the world has to contend with,” according to a statement. Krishnamachari says that the exhibition will be “an examination of political narratives and critical global engagement, and an acknowledgement of a collective responsibility therein”.
This will be the second biennial launching in China this year. Shanghai Project, opening in September this year, will be overseen by Yongwoo Lee, the director of Shanghai Himalayas Museum, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of Serpentine Galleries in London.
Moca Yinchuan opened last summer inside a 2.5-hectare wetlands park in the capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Three years in the making, MoCA Yinchuan is owned and operated by the Ningxia Minsheng Group, a regional property developer. The institution, which cost 300m yuan (£30m) to build, was developed under a new public-private partnership policy called BOT (build-operate-transfer).
Meanwhile, the Delhi-based artist group, Raqs Media Collective, were appointed earlier this year as curators of the 11th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (opens 11 November).
