Philosopher Bruno Latour, curator of Taipei Biennial and ZKM exhibitions, dies at 75

French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist Bruno Latour has died. He was 75. Latour was renowned for challenging modernity's separation of nature and society, a central theme in his 1991 book 'We Have Never Been Modern'. His 2020 Taipei Biennial, co-curated with Martin Guinard and titled 'You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet', explored political polarization and the climate crisis through artworks by Yao Jui-Chung, Cooking Sections, and Pierre Huyghe. Throughout the 2000s, after retiring from teaching, Latour curated four major 'thought exhibitions' at Germany's Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) with artist Peter Weibel. These exhibitions, including 'Iconoclash: Beyond the Image-Wars in Science, Religion and Art' (2002), 'Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy' (2005), 'Reset Modernity!' (2016), and 'Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics' (2020), investigated art's capacity to address urgent issues like the climate emergency. In his 2017 collection 'Facing Gaia', Latour proposed moving beyond the nature-culture dichotomy toward a concept of 'world' or 'worlding' that embraces the multiplicity of existents and their ways of being.