“Mind Rising, Spirits Tuning”, the 13th edition of the Gwangju Biennale, is curated by Natasha Ginwala and Defne Ayas. The biennale sets out to explore the current global condition through artistic and theoretical means that draw from coginitive and lived experience. The event examines what the artistic directors call”the spectrum of the extended mind” by delving into a broad set of “cosmologies”, layered with ideas of evolution, artificial intelligence, organic and inorganic life, and life-systems and survival strategies. By exploring all these diverse notions, the biennale proposes multifarious views and understandings of the past, present and future. The expanded biennale programme, formed both in the virtual and physical space, online and offline, looks at “cognitive capitalism, algorithmic violence and planetary imperialisms” of the future and the “current global condition of grief, alienation and systemic breakdown”.
Artists use “vocabularies of resilience, dissent and renewal” to address important questions of racial injustice, feminist knowledge, political challenges and social experiences, especially connected with Asian realities. Organic and cybernetic intelligence, cognitive and lived experience are at the centre of the investigation that looks into the histories and philosophies of Asian communities.
This year the Gwangju Biennale also has a special local connection to Korean history, as the city of Gwangju last year celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising or Gwangju Democratisation Movement, which saw the death of around 2,000 people. During the uprising, citizens armed themselves by robbing local armories and police stations after local Chonnam University students, who were demonstrating against the martial law government ,were fired upon, killed, raped and beaten by government troops.
It is this kind of experience and others that the Biennale goes on to remember, question and challenge, by engaging the mind into an examination of the human psyche and life, and propose different, better ways of living our present and our future.
In a 2020 insightful interview on STIR, the curators reveal more details about the premise of the Biennale, their inspirations and the programme of the event. Defne Ayas lays down the questions that are at the core of the Biennale, while revealing its philosophical inspiration:
What is the ‘real’nature of intelligence? Where are we heading in our co-evolution with artificial intelligence? How do we learn survival strategies from living organisms and microbial agents? What is foreign in us that also benefits us? In our exhibition we set out to examine the entire spectrum of intelligence, with both the organic and inorganic intelligence in mind. We were inspired by philosopher Catherina Malabou’s work that encourages a dialectic understanding between organic and cybernetic intelligence and has consistently worked on the notion of plasticity, for more than two decades now, and not only drawing from Hegel and Freud, but also from the cognitive and neurosciences.
At the same time, Natasha Ginwala sheds more light on Asian notions that are pivotal to the understanding of the Biennale, and how their misunderstanding has led to colonial views of the region:
Across Asian visual culture, lived histories and philosophy, we witness that there is a forgrounding of the indivisible connections between mind-body; human and non-human cognitive experience; and ways of ‘worlding’ that draw together spirit beings, practices of healing and reparation, queer desire, as well as indigenous knowledge cosmologies. The binary imperative or structual dualism that ruptures this webwork of embodied intelligence has led to false universalisms spun by colonial modernity and human science.
Ultimately, Ginwala reveals to STIR:
With Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning we seek to draw out aspects of the ‘communal mind’ and its artistic as well as restorative potential in the present struggles toward social justice. While there are growing challenges emanating from augmented reality, technological inequity and algorithmic regimes in governing our socio-political lives, the kernel of organic intelligence that we tap into is adaptibility, sociality, marked experiences of trauma, but also vocabularies of dissidence.
In “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning” there are 69 participating artists and 40 new commissions. Alongside the exhibition there are also the Gwangju Biennale Commission (GB Commission), which seeks to explore the history, architectural artifacts, traditions, memories and civil spirit of the city of Gwangju and the origin of the Gwangju Biennale; the Pavilion Project, which hosts leading international art institutions connecting the Gwangju region to a wider international arts community; and MaytoDay, the May 18 Democratization Movement Special Exhibition. Another central part of the programme is the online and print journal, “MInds Rising”, which serves as an ensemble of the research process of the Biennale, and features interdisciplinary content and artistic ideas. The 13th Gwangju Biennale takes place across various locations, including the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall, Gwangju National Museum, Gwangju Theater, Yangnim mountain – Horanggasy Artpolygon, as well as online on social media channels and the Biennale website.
Gwangju Biennale Hall
The Gwangju Biennale Hall has been the primary location of the Gwangju Biennale since its inception in 1995, opened fifteen years after the Civil Uprising, and stands as a monument to the spirits of the uprising and their significance in light of contemporary and historical civic struggles that connect Gwangju, South Korea, and Asia with the rest of the world. It is the largetst of the exhibition venues and hosts over 50 artists in its five large galleries.
Gallery 1, titled “Rising Together”, features works that presente “a spectrum of commemorative aesthetics, virtual terrains, forms of gathering, and sacred emblems of protection and recovery”. Alongside the work of contemporary artists, this section also includes ceremonial amulets, ritual paintings and relics from major collections of Korean Shamanism and folk painting – namely, The Museum of Shamanism and Gahoe Minhwa Museum. Some new commissions here are works by Korean painter Min Joung-Ki, a pioneer of the Minjung art movement and Korean artist Moon Kyungwon.
Min Joung-Ki, as does Korean photographer Gap-chul Lee, delves into and maps hidden aspects of Korea’s spiritual life, landscapes and devotional practices. The seminal painter’s newest work, Poetic Circles’ Pavilions in Mountain Mudeung (2020), traces the presence of circle pavilions around Mudeungsan, the mountain located in the center of Gwangju.
During the chaotic and conflictual period of the late Joseon Dynasty, these ritual sites were used as spaces to heal people’s character defects. His other 2020 painting entitled Altar of Heaven in Mountain Mudeung, which depicts temples and old streets around Cheonjedan, a place where ancestral rites were observed in the sky against the backdrop of Mudeungsan. For the artist, this particular site was not only a place of simple worship and shamanic tradition, but also represents the origin of the spirit and creative force of Koreans, embracing past and present, and capturing the mountain’s long spiritual history.
Moon Kyungwon’s new work Promise Park (2021) is an extension of the artist’s series of the same title. The project Promise Park explores the urban environment, relationships between human cognition, sociality and technology, and the historiographic becoming of humanity. The ‘park’ is a metaphor for a space that visualises and reassesses the tumultuous episodes in Korea’s modern history and socioeconomic development. What lies beneath the large residential complexes and the historical park surrounding the Gwangju region’s waterways and mountain paths is a history of an industrial past that saw the transformation of the area economically and socially. Here, in the 1950s, there were textile factories that conducted explotation by the Japanese, while the 1960s saw the foundation of modern industries.
Moon’s Promise Park therefore becomes a model of inquiry into a past that has been long-buried beneath the beautiful façade of today’s economic prosperity. Promise Park is a public garden where viewers can experience shared temporality and space in its entirety; it is a gathering site for communal empathy and solidarity. In this work, the artist traces the transformation of the urban landscape across old maps of Gwangju, teasing out patterns of now invisible traces of time and different stories, woven into her tapestries’ narratives. Since 2015, she has adapted the series to different contexts, and for the Gwangju Biennale, the artist has collaborated with cognitive scientists, architects, regional cultural researchers, scholars of Chinese astrology and other specialists to explore transformations of the built landscape, social practices and neurocognition. Promise Park provides a platform for the social exchange of intergenerational perspectives while taking account
of Gwangju’s traumatic past and ongoing solidarity alliances.
Titled “Kinship of Mountains, Fields and Rivers”, Gallery 2 fearures works that converge amidst transforming ecologies from mountains to rivers and with communal practices from the Korean peninsula to Sápmi and Aotearoa (New Zealand).
Works draw from visual culture of Korea beyond the field of contemporary art and focus on oral cultures, rural cosmologies, and forms of labour in agrarian life. Artists here infuse their work and practice with folk traditions from their own territories, such as Pacita Abad’s Trapunto tapestries of world travels and Filipino customs or Jumaadi’s cloth paintings and their secular storytelling of Javanese life. There are Arpita Singh’s paintings that bridge the political and the poetic of everyday life through visual fables of female bodies and intimate social relations. Aotearoan artist Shannon Te Ao’s film echoes with Māori songs and whakataukī (proverbs), while Tuguldur Yondonjamts’s installation brings together poetry and mythologies from nomadic traditions, presenting mystical readings of the Mongolian landscape and cultural legacy.
Gwangju-based photographer Hyun-taek Cho’s new commission explores the panorama of spiritual stone scultpures within the changing faces of neighbourhoods and community spaces viewed in the solitary atmosphere of the night. Cho captures the traces of transformation in modern Korean ways of life, by observing the impact of Gwangju’s gentrification on the city’s older quarters and its replacement of traditional life practices.
Cho creates experimental andsensitive portrayals of this new reality through the use of various techniques, from camera obscura to panoramic imaging. By challenging the medium of photography, Cho is able to examine the role of sacred emblems, belief systems and commercialisation within a changing landscape that reveals the tensions between modern and traditional cultural values and sacred beliefs. His photographic experimentation is visible in the tactility of details such as the edges of peeling wallpaper or the overgrown greenery coming out of the window of an abandoned building. The tension between past and present materialises in the sacred icons captures in his images, which clash with the transforming surroundings due to modern development and the rapid spread of Christianity on the Korean peninsula.
Documenting the underground survival of animist and shamanic practices within the landscape of Korea’s capitalist economy, Cho has since 2018 travelled the country to photograph stone statue markets that manufacture and sell grave markers. While working on his project, he has seen people bowing, praying and paying homage with offerings to these statues, revealing the active presence of bygone faiths and reverence for ancient gods.
Using a wide range of media, Korearn artist Sangdon Kim creates scultpures that draw from Korean shamanism, colonial memory, contemporary politics and circuits of hyper consumption. According to Kim, it is possible to understand the world through shamanistic polytheism and pluralism as they do not refuse the secular but rather pursue the sacred. Moreover, shamanistic faith is rooted in the community and brings people together. In times when humanity is in crisis, it is natural to turn towards spiritual cultures based on collective catharsis and reconciliation. For the artist, an approach based on shamanism would facilitate the healing of social wounds, mourning and remorse, especially in critical times such as the current pandemic. Through his work, Kim aims to demonstrate that collectivity and cohabitation are inherent to and inextricable from the human condition and life.
Since his return from his studies in Germany, the artist has been producing works that are deeply entrenched in animism, Korean myths and fairytales. His new commission The Gate of Hell (2021) is a parade of his new works created with motifs from dashiraegi, the traditional funeral culture of Jindo, to emphasize the collective act of mourning and overcoming crises. Among them is a cart in the shape of a sang-yeo – a traditional structure used to carry the dead – which is employed here by the artist as a metaphor for an unstable reality obscured by the glamours of capitalism, the power of mass media and a sterilised, uniform society.
Gallery 3, titled “Bodies in Desire, Beyond Disciplinary Fold”, considers the ways in which collective freedom is created through social imaginaries resisting models of society that use incarceration, surveillance and violence, especially now with the rise of authoritarianism and militarism. For instance, Filipino artist Cian Dayrit’s narrative projects map events that interrogate imperial histories, methods of perpetuation of state terror, and the foundations of neoliberal economy that revolutionise common practices of ownership and environmental justice. Dayrit uses his work to map and uncover the injustice of colonial and corporate violence, to reveal how peasants and minorities are the most vulnerable ones.
His new commissions for the 13th Gwangju Biennale include installations and sculptures. The large multi-part installation of embroidered quilts and sculptures entitled Schemes of Belligerence (2021) looks at the image of masculine valour, and the connected schemes of torture and martial culture in neocolonies. Theatrics of Power (2021) is an ensemble of trophies that celebrate power and authority, such as found uniforms, patches, badges, photographs, totems and weaponry. The Methods of Madness (2021) wooden sculptures reference another aspect of power, that which is expressed through physical control, such as corporal punishment, as well as mental control, like through the manipulation by puppet governments, indoctrination strategies and brain washing.
Dayrit’s collaborative tapestries expose the United States’ interventionist politics, like the weapons trade under Duterte and the Philippines’ recent Anti-Terror Bill. Among the references he uses are satellite images of American military bases in the Philippines and South Korea, air raids and the brutality against the Filipino people.
In Gallery 3 there is also an exploration of the plural conditions of bodies and the hybridity of pleasure and desire that breaks the boundaries of the socially-imposed mind-body relations. An example is Kangseung Lee’s work that looks at narratives of the marginalized and proposes alternative histories, or re-presents the memories of forgotten individuals whose existence was denied. At Gwangju Biennale, Lee presents the project Untitled (QueerArch) (2018–21), which features an expanded presentation of the Korea Queer Archive (Queer Arch) juxtaposed with the lives of queer individuals from different locations, thus positioning Korea’s queer history as part of the global movement for queer liberation. Queer Arch was established in Seoul in 2002 as the personal archive of Chae-yoon Hahn, a prominent queer activist and the editor-in-chief of BUDDY, one of the first queer magazines in South Korea. Partly exhibited for the first time in 2019 in Seoul, the ongoing project today includes not only Hahn’s personal archive but also more than seven hundred films and thousands of private and official documents.
In his work at Gwangju Biennale, Lee juxtaposes the records of Korean sexual minorities with those of Harvey Milk, the first queer politician in the United States, renowned experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman, and William Dorsey Swann, a man born a slave in the American South and presumably the first American drag queen.
“Matters of Mutation” in Gallery 4 looks at the effects of “accelerated capitalism” and the tumultuous contemporaneity, visualised through “mutant beings — both microscopic and colossal — that quickly replace dated concepts of beauty, race and western constructs of “nature””.
Shen Xin’s new commission Brine Lake (A New Body) (2020) is a multichannel video and sound installation with multilingual dialogues among ghostly presences, post-industrial lands and ancestral figures. In their work, Shen Xin give voice to the marginalised, those who whether real or imagined do not fit into existing taxonomies of nation-states and mainstream institutional categories. Their five-channel film installation rooted in research
on Korean immigrants in Russia, Central Asia and Japan, in which iodine recycling and processing becomes a metaphor for statelessness. In the film, two female actors representing fictional companies visit an iodine recycling factory at an unknown location, and converse with two factory employees – ghosts – whose identities are represented by the cameras. At the end, the bilingual actors talking with nondescript, invisible counterparts create an atmosphere of unresolved sentiments and through the mechanisms of empathy, prompt the viewer to actively participate.
Seoul- and Berlin-based Sylbee Kim presents Unindebted Life (2021), a single channel video installation with retroreflective screens and mobile phone flashlight. Reflecting the artist’s own sense of non-belongin, the work explores the lives of individuals judged by various social standards such as class, appearance, age and identity. Kim questions the possibility of a future time and space where individuals can coexist free from socially constricting categorisations, and both be and express who they are in their heterogeneity. The flashing lights in the work are a metaphor for the persistent hope in fundamental shifts over generations that will bring about the possibility of a better future.
The last gallery, “Matriarchy in Motion”, explores “matriarchal cultures and knowledge acquired through feminine wisdom(s)”, spannign from Korean mytohlogy to Aboriginal Australia. Dutch artist Femke Herregraven’s Twenty Birds Inside Her Chest (2021) follows Elaine Morgan’s controversial hypothesis that humans evolved from isolated, semi-aquatic primates and not from the predominant male hunter type.
The work is a sound archive of the sumbisori, a high-pitched whistle emitted by the haenyeo — female freedivers on Jeju Island — as they surface from deep water. The sound is the result of the forceful expulsion of carbon dioxide from the divers’ lungs, followed by a quick intake of fresh oxygen. The artist says that “the sumbisori symbolizes not only their adaptation to water but also the moment of moving between life and death, of overcoming the moment”.
The work is the result of the artist’s collaboration with composer BJ Nilsen the haenyeo community. The sound compositions are placed inside eight sculptures, which combine the shape of the human larynx inside a circular installation reminiscent of the bulteok, a structure for the haenyeo‘s shamanic rituals and community meetings.
Angela Melitopoulos’s latest work looks at folk traditions from another locale, that of Aboriginal Australia. Her four-part video essay entitled Matri Linear B (2021–ongoing), which turns the camera eye towards Earth’s surface, questions modes of viewing and perceiving the landscape. The project is multi-layered, examining geological and civilizational history through modern anthropology and subversive archaeology. The work looks at Earth as a “speaking landscape” of matrilineal heritage across time and space. Surfacing Earth (2021), the second chapter of Matri Linear B, premiering at the 13th Gwangju Biennale, explores the myriad functions that the landscape plays in the Aboriginal cultures of Australia. Following Rebecca Wilyuka and her desert paintings, the video juxtaposes the Aboriginal artist’s memories of terrains with the physical reality of the Earth’s surface captured with image technologies.
Like the Korean haenyeo‘s holding experience and knowledge about the natural systems they inhabit, their disturbances and possibly their – and our – future, so the Aboriginal people of Australia in Angela Melitopoulos’s work hold the key to indigenous cosmologies that might help to save us from the ongoing ecocide.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
In the second part of our exploration of the 13th Gwangju Biennale, we will look at some of the new commissions on show at the other Biennale locations — Gwangju National Museum, Gwangju Theater, Yangnim mountain – Horanggasy Artpolygon. In the third and final part of the Gwangju Biennale series we will explore this year’s Pavilion Project, the Gwangju Biennale Commission (GB Commission) and the MaytoDay exhibition.
Click here for “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning: the 13th Gwangju Biennale — Part 2”
Part 3 of “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning: the 13th Gwangju Biennale” Coming soon…
Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning: the 13th Gwangju Biennale runs from 1 April to 9 May 2021 at different locations in Gwangju, Korea, and on social media platforms and the Biennale website.