Taus Makhacheva in Why Not Ask Again, the 11th Shanghai Biennale
The phrase “Why Not Ask Again” is a bid, and a query, whose ascending, joyously twisting arc embraces the maneuvers, disputations and stories that contain and encode the turbulences and transports of our time. A listener eavesdropping on deep space walks out of the pages of the recent science fiction novel written in Chinese, The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. A wanderer steps out into the deep time of eternity and the straight path of a police bullet in the terminal sequence of the picaresque Bengali film Jukti, Takko aar Gappo (Reason, Debate and a Story) from 1974 by Ritwik Ghatak. They embody the spirit of a mobile triangulation between reason, intuition and the fabulous that the 11th Shanghai Biennale seeks to discover, transmit, and learn from. Curated by Raqs Media Collective.