GWANGJU, South Korea — One warm February morning, curator Defne
Ayas bounded up a steep, sylvan path toward a cemetery in this city of 1.5
million as she discussed shamanic practices, resistance movements and other
aspects of the area’s history that are themes in the art exhibition she was
finalizing nearby.
اضافة اعلان
“It’s been a long journey,” Ayas said as she caught her breath.
Factoring in coronavirus-induced postponements, she and her co-artistic
director, Natasha Ginwala, have been developing their edition of the Gwangju
Biennale for more than two years.
Originally scheduled to open last September, and then in
February, “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning” is now on tap for April 1. The most
closely watched art biennial in Asia, the exhibition has been integral to South
Korea’s efforts to boost its contemporary art scene.Its curators will be back
in Berlin, where they are based. (Ginwala is an associate curator at the
Gropius Bau museum; Ayas, a curator-at-large for the V-A-C Foundation of Moscow
and Venice, Italy.) Each spent two weeks in quarantine after flying into South
Korea to prep the show. It will close after a mere 39 days, on May 9 — about
half its intended duration. The Venice Biennale, in contrast, runs for seven
luxurious months.
But as other international exhibitions have opted for longer
delays, Ginwala and Ayas have plowed ahead, buoyed by South Korea’s
comparatively successful management of the pandemic, which has allowed art
fairs and exhibitions to open during periods of eased social distancing. The
curators wanted “to set an example of doing things in a way that sustains and
responds to this moment,” Ginwala said, sitting behind a plastic barrier in a
biennial office.
Over the past few decades, biennials have been arenas for
networking, as curators, collectors, dealers and artists descended on far-flung
cities to share information and cut deals. Gwangju’s show now attracts a
fraction of the 1.6 million who attended the first one, in 1995, but “it has
become one of the more prominent destinations on the biennale circuit,” said
Joan Kee, an art history professor at the University of Michigan.
Over the years, the biennial has hired top-flight curators like
Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum’s artistic director, and Okwui Enwezor, who
died in 2019. The show has “played a role in the appreciation by the global art
world of what Korea has to offer in terms of artists, galleries, nonprofits and
institutions,” said Pat Lee, a director at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul, about two
hours north by high-speed train.
Attendees at Gioni’s 2010 edition recalled alighting at Jayu (“Freedom”),
a since-closed dance hall that billed itself as the largest club in Asia,
according to Lee (who helped plan the party), with “many surreal things like
opening rooftops, cascading bubbles, DJ platforms coming down from the roof.”
It was a pretty good night out in the country’s sixth-largest city.
The 2021 outing will, inevitably, be a more low-key affair.
Of the 69 artists and groups selected to fill four venues, only
three braved the quarantine to install on site. (Eight are based in Korea.) It is
a wildly eclectic bunch. Ayas said that she and Ginwala looked for art that
embodies forms of intelligence, “from the heart, from streams of consciousness
that are ancestral, that are cosmological” — and that takes up issues like
artificial intelligence and “collective modes of solidarity that you might find
in Indigenous contexts or in matriarchal cultures.”
One team that made the trek was the Paris-based vanguard
choreography duo known as EightOS (∞OS), Dmitry Paranyushkin and Koo
Des. “Right now, it’s very difficult to work with groups, it’s almost not
allowed, and here we have this opportunity, so of course, we jumped at it,” the
Moscow-born Paranyushkin said, midway through his quarantine at a Seoul hotel.
EightOS — a “body-mind operating system,” in his words —
involves performers wearing headsets that vibrate to indicate if they are
moving in a way that suggests the fractal geometry found in many organic forms.
Paranyushkin had been using the device to exercise in his room a few hours
every day, he said. “It’s a way to reconnect to nature.”
The curators planned for EightOS to help organize a dance at the
biennial’s sprawling exhibition hall with local children, samul nori drummers,
sculptures that artist Sangdon Kim built atop shopping carts and a sutra
reading from Jeong Kwan, a renowned Buddhist nun and chef whose monastery is in
the region.
“The biennale is almost set up now as a television studio where
the procession is being recorded,” Ayas said. The reality was that most viewers
— and most of the artists — will only experience the exhibition online.
Some participants, at least, were able to visit Gwangju with the
curators to research their works before intercontinental journeys became
difficult.
Colombian Ana María Millán met with live-action role players and
a feminist gaming group called Famerz to develop characters and a scenario for
an off-the-wall video game that is playable on-site, but the artist will sit
out the biennial in Berlin. “The protagonists, they belong also to the virtual
worlds,” she said, “so I am enjoying playing the game at home.”
Sylbee Kim, who works between Berlin and Seoul, filmed scenes
for a poetic audiovisual installation that follows a sci-fi band of wanderers
before heading back to Germany. Kim returned to South Korea this month. She was
a student in Seoul when she first went to the biennial, which was founded as a
response to the 1980 Gwangju Uprising — “what is sometimes referred to as Korea’s
Tiananmen,” Kee said. Demonstrators rose up against a military dictatorship,
which killed many of them. The events are still fiercely contested.
Political liberalization starting in the late 1980s gradually
led to greater awareness of the censored incident. But “it took decades until
the democratic movement gained importance through revised historical views,”
Kim said.
“The biennial is really a way to reconcile with this traumatic
past, when the government” attacked its own citizens, Ayas said. “Every two
years there’s that remembrance moment.” That mission, commemorating a failed
fight against martial law, has a bracing resonance amid the Myanmar military’s
recent shooting of protesters and Thailand’s crackdown on pro-democracy
activists.
“The first edition of the Biennale invited artists whose work
(both literary and artistic) was candidly in opposition to the military regime,”
Korean painter Min Joung-ki, who participated in 1995, said in an email. This
time, Min’s contributions include tranquil, radiant landscape paintings, rich
with historical allusions.
The show’s oppositional spirit endures in the unsparing
paintings of Sangho Lee, a South Korean artist imprisoned because of his art
during the waning days of the dictatorship. In one work in the biennial, Lee
has depicted supporters of the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 through
World War II, their hands tied, awaiting trials that did not occur.
Scattered around the world, the artists of “Minds Rising,
Spirits Tuning” may never actually get to meet, but in Gwangju their work has
formed a layered, and action-packed, show. As it was nearing completion,
artists and organizers convened in a snaking line for the big dance that Ayas
had mentioned. The procession moved, percussionists loudly sounding their
instruments, children in uniforms swaying their arms and EightOS dancers
maneuvering around them. Videographers swooped about, capturing it all.
After a break, about 20 people involved in the show assembled on
pillows for a tea ceremony presided over by Kwan, the Buddhist nun, in the
cavernous, silent exhibition hall. She said that she wanted those listening to
be able to relax after their work and difficulties.
Through a translator, Kwan said she hoped her audience would
think about “How am I going to live in the future?” That could be a motto for
this hard-won biennial, which is now awaiting viewers who might be grappling
with just that question.
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