Welcome to HERO Young Art Week – our essential, multifaceted guide to the new wave of creatives working at the vanguard of contemporary art today. Across a dynamic week of digital content, we’re exploring what’s happening at the epicentre of this global community: from the ground up, the artists themselves and the key figures witnessing the evolution of the ideas, trends and movements defining this art generation.

Nicolas Bourriaud is the Director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts, an art school in Paris. He co-founded, and from 1999 to 2006 was co-director of Palais de Tokyo (Paris), a major centre for modern and contemporary art, and is widely known in the context of relational aesthetics, a tendency in fine art practice he brought to attention in the 1990s.

We have irreversibly altered the atmosphere, brought about the extinction of species, and, as a result, have propelled ourselves into a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. The dawning of this new ‘Human Age’ announces the arrival of a moment where nature and culture have become irreversibly entangled: humans are becoming a geological force, the earth is becoming man-made. With ‘The Great Acceleration’, the ninth iteration of the Taipei Biennial, curator Nicolas Bourriaud presents an international group of fifty-one artists whose diverse practices navigate this new world order, inventing pathways and exploring new states of matter and new forms of relations.

Bourriaud’s analysis is posed through an expansion of his famed theory of relational aesthetics, first introduced in the 90s, “to include our relationships with machines, animals, plants or rocks.” This recalibration of relational aesthetics incorporates a critical response to the present philosophical trend of speculative realism, loosely defined by its stance against philosophies that privilege the human over other entities. Bourriaud acknowledges that this mode of thought, which maintains that objects exist independently of human perception, lends itself to the possibility of developing a renewed relationship with our environment.

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