After exploring “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning: the 13th Gwangju Biennale” at the Gwangju Biennale Hall, the main Biennale location, in “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning: the 13th Gwangju Biennale — Part 1”, ASIA is here going to look at some of the new artist commissions and works on view at Gwangju National Museum, Gwangju Theater and Yangnim mountain – Horanggasy Artpolygon.
Gwangju National Museum: “The Undead from Four Directions”
The Gwangju Biennale exhibition at the Gwangju National Museum titled “The Undead from Four Directions” features the work of Farid Belkahia, Ali Cherri, Theo Eshetu, Trajal Harrell, Gala Porras-Kim, Chrysanne Stathacos and Cecilia Vicuña. The show, as the title suggests, offers a space for dialogues of death and the afterlife, the reparation of spirit-objects, the corporeal limits of the body and acts of mourning. The various works on display find links in ancestral worship and tradition, spiritual ailments and cures, and the fundamental role of the undead — or spiritual — in shaping the reality of the living.
Brisith video artist Theo Eshetu’s new work Ghostdance (2020) continues on his efforts to capture the interrelation of cultural worlds. It also examines the questions surrounding museum objects, their origins, their movement and their belonging, within the framework of East and Africa/West historical relationships. Ghostdance looks at the relations between the ethnographical display of Asian and African collections and the metaphorical cycle of death and life as they enter the museum space. The video work was shot at Berlin’s Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art as well as the yet-to-be unveiled Humboldtforum.
Two dancers embody this question, through carefully coreographed performances. Butoh dancer Yuko Kaseki emulates the transmutation of the human body into other forms (the museum objects), while Edivaldo Ernesto’s improvised choreography blends contemporary and traditional African dance that suggests an attempt to escape from the display vitrines. While moving and migrating from one space to another, as museum objects, the dancers become a reference to the restitution of looted goods from colonized territories.
American dancer and choreographer Trajal Harrell also uses butoh dance in his work Sister or He Buried the Body (2021). Since 2013, he has been exploring Japanese butoh dance and its founder Tatsumi Hijikata, to create a speculative remapping of the history of contemporary dance and composition. He has also found a speculative connection between Hijikata and African-American choreographer Katherine Dunham and her seminal research on Haitian Vodou. As Hijikata shared a studio with Dunham before he made his first butoh piece, Harrell advances that Dunham might be “the long-lost mother of butoh”.
His new piece for the 13th Gwangju Biennale is strongly inspired by the aesthetics of Japanese folk theater that evolved into the Kabuki tradition, presented and performed on a makeshi runway made of woven grass mats. Hijikata once said that “dead sister is my real teacher of butoh. We need to lesson hard with the dead constantly. We need to live together with the dead.” Harrell’s new work is an attempt to rerun and archive Hijikata’s sister’s story, and suggests that his dead sister might be Dunham.
Gala Porras-Kim also explores the museum environment and the objects on display, but concentrates on one particular ‘artefact’: the human body and its remains. Bodies are often exhumed and transplanted into an institutional afterlife that is far from the one they chose for themselves before dying. Porras-Kim explores how museum practices intersect with the afterlives and ritual passages of the dead. With her new work A terminal escape from the place that binds us (2020), she tries to give a new humanity to those bodies and remains who are now in the possession of the Gwangju National Museum, and whose spirits might want to be buried elsewhere.
In 2019, Porras-Kim travelled to Gwangju to examine the unplanned worldly afterlife of bodies (1st century B.C., from Shinchang-Dong, Gwangju) in the collection of the Gwangju National Museum. She used encromancy — divination by ink stains — to contact spirits and ask them to manifest a preferred location for their remains. Using paper marbling techniques, with vivid pigments suspended on the surface of water, Porras-Kim contacted spirits asking them to reorganise the pigments and visualise an image mapping the ideal setting for their remains.
At the Gawngju National Museum, the majority of the artists are from the West, yet they all find a connection to the East and communicate their fascination and affinity with it. Of Greek origins, Chrysanne Stathacos also explores this link, by creating The Three Dakini Mirrors (of the body, speech, and mind) (2021), a series of mandala installations that reference her Buddhist faith. Made of coloured rose petals arranged in concentric circles around mirrors reflecting the sky, the work and the process of making them are a ritual meditation and offering to the universe. During the show, the installations will slowly come apart, symbolising the transience of human life, and at the end, the artist will destroy the work with her own breath in a cleansing ritual of end and renewal.
Gwangju National Theater: “Sovereign Image Worlds”
Korea’s oldest operational cinema hosts “Sovereign Image Worlds”, a show of cinematic aesthetics featuring the work of Indigenous Australian media group Karrabing Film Collective, Canadian multidisciplinary artist Judy Radul and photomontages by Polish pohtographer Zofia Rydet developed in the late 1970s.
The word “karrabing”, the indigenous Emiyengal language, refers to the lowest point of the tide when the community can hold collective gatherings along the northwestern coastline of Australia, home of the Karrabing Film Collective. With forty members from different generational and social backgrounds, the collective conducts audiovisual experiments with phones or handheld cameras revealing ancestral and agential narratives of their communities in Beluyen, Northern Territory.
Addressing diverse issues ranging from settler colonialism and daily police surveillance, to resource extraction, religious conversion and indebtedness, their films merge dreamscapes with fiction and archival footage that resist the trappings of neocolonialism. At the Gwangju Biennale, their new film installation sits alongside their graffitied iron sheets and seating made from used tires.
Their five-channel video installation at Gwangju Biennale, Forward with the Ancestors: Day in the Life (2020), follows a typical day in the community’s life in five chapters: “Breakfast”, “Play Time”, “Lunch Run”, “Cocktail Hour” and “Takeout Dinner”. The soundtrack is a hip-hop tune that provides a satiric tone to the work. The daily routines are interspersed with archival radio and television clips shedding a light on the larger social context of Aboriginals, forced into their state-sanctioned stereotypes and dependency on government aid.
Yangnim mountain – Horanggasy Artpolygon: “Deep Memory, Multi-species Time”
The sacred Yangnim Mountain is a symbol of Korea’s layered histories, with its traditional Korean architecture, colonial-era cave tunnels missionary sites as remnants of different periods, from Japanese colonisation and anticolonial resistance to Christian evangelisation, and American missions in Gwangju. The mountain hosts some of the Gwangju Biennale projects for the first time, in the Horanggasy Artpolygon.
It is here, a community art space located at the base of a cemetery that was used as a site for sky burials, that Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai presents his most recent film installation Songs for Dying (2021). The workinterweaves histories of death and protest, in an act of honouring the forgotten dead and allowing for communal healing. In this work, the artist investigates the idea of sovereignty, ancestral storytelling, the ongoing pro-democracy protests in Thailand, and the transit of distressed spirits, with shamanic and animist rituals in Jeju, Philippines, and Thailand. The narrating voice is that of a sea turtle, a revered spirit and descendant of a mythical dragon, telling a story of loss, resistance and familial love. Here the artist looks at memories of the last moments spent with his grandfather, Jeju Island’s mythological origins and the legacy
of haenyo sea divers’ sea farming culture. There is footage of crowds marching against the Thai monarchy in 2020 combined with shamanic rituals and the songs of ghosts dissolving the boundaries between life and death.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
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 ” Rising, Spirits Tuning: the 13th Gwangju Biennale — Part 1“
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.