It has been almost 30 years since the first Gwangju Biennale, and the latest edition is the largest to date. By interacting with the city’s locale, it seeks to focus on collaborative efforts and on bridging the gap between domestic and international art, but questions inevitably arise.
Entitled PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century, the 15th iteration of the Gwangju Biennale features 31 pavilions and gathers 72 artists from 30 countries as it attempts to map the complexity of the contemporary world. Pansori is a traditional Korean music genre that combines storytelling performed by a vocalist and a drummer, with the term loosely explained as meaning “noise from the public place where people gather”. By way of a heads-up on what was to follow, during his opening speech the biennale’s artistic director, Nicolas Bourriaud, introduced the main pavilion by saying “It is going to feel chaotic and claustrophobic”.
Perhaps the chaos and claustrophobia come from the desire to do so many things all at once. Every buzzword is present in almost every wall text: “Conflictual borders, anti-migration walls, confinement, social distance, segregation policies… These seemingly dissimilar topics share a common point, which is space and its political organisation.” In his 1970 book Aesthetic Theory, the philosopher and social critic Theodor W Adorno argued that “modern art is questionable not when it goes too far – as the cliché runs – but when it does not go far enough.”
My “Big Perhaps” is that the 15th Gwangju Biennale does not go far enough, although it certainly tries. It touches on many broad and narrow topics, but the result is a mash-up of hits and misses. The main exhibition is organised into galleries, with names derived from auditory metaphors: Feedback Effect deals with the resonance of spatial collapse; Polyphony shows a tapestry woven from diverse sonic threads; and Primordial Sound is the echo of creation reverberating through space. The idea of a soundscape being a landscape is explored successfully through the sound works that reverberate, leaking from one wall to another, disrupting or complementing the artwork next to it.
I was welcomed by Cinthia Marcelle’s adaptation of Não existe mais lugar neste lugar [There Is No More Place in This Place] (2019–24), wherein the ceilings are low and one somehow feels interrupted by a manufactured calamity. On the same floor I was drawn to Mira Mann’s objects of the wind (2024), a panoramic installation dedicated to Korean nurses working in Germany and reminiscent of a pre-performance ritual or a glamorised memorial. Etchings of floor plans, news clippings and institutional logos are imprinted on the mirrors. Jindo Buk drums are arranged carefully. At one point, it feels like a group of performers are about to flock in and prepare for a performance.
Sung Tieu’s System’s Void (2024) provides five black “voids” surrounded by sand. As the 60-minute sound loops through its space, a series of numbers appear. Simultaneously, words such as ‘proprietary’ come up in bold capital letters. A different approach is advised for viewing the drawings and paintings on paper of Deniz Aktaş, for which getting up close and personal is almost a requirement. scattered, pile, broken, bounded and remains provide contrasted monochromatic reflection of a landscape or photograph. For example, in pile (2024) is an indistinguishable pile of objects on a rock, yet the image is redacted or extracted from a more extensive landscape, perhaps from the full images beside it. From afar, the picture is sharp and crisp, almost a photograph. And yet, as you get closer, the image disperses amid the artist’s carefully drawn strokes.
In other galleries there are several attempts at showing spectacles, with the works occupying enough space to allow the audience to be immersed whilst introducing some interactivity. Max Hooper Schneider’s LYSIS FIELD (2024) stands out as an example of such large-scale, performative installations. Another is Haseeb Ahmed’s Stock Weather III (2024), where you are obliged to walk along a wooden bridge to look down and see sand or look ahead and see stock market data. And while Marguerite Humeau’s light-filled *stirs (2024) feels like a forced enlightenment, Bianca Bondi’s salt-filled installation The Long Dark Swim (2024) encourages access to a dream-like state.
Outside the main exhibition, I was also curious about the Horanggasinamu Base Polygon in Yangnim. Currently it is a cultural space, but it used to be the home of Christian missionaries who settled in Gwangju. In the basement Lydia Ourahmane presents House of Hope Archives (1989–), comprising photographic documentation of the spiritual community that her family founded and served during the Algerian Civil War. There are five slide projectors showing 400 photographs. As each image changes, a clicking sound occurs in a snap, taking you away from the hypnotic nostalgia that each photo evokes. Ourahmane’s work is all at once eerie and hopeful that a community can be built during turbulent times and give solace to those in, and around, it.
Of 31 pavilions, only one was from the Middle East. Qatar is the first Arab country to have a standalone pavilion, located in the Kwangju Bank Art Hall and curated and organised by the National Museum of Qatar. Knock, Rain, Knock features newly commissioned artworks from seven Qatari and Qatar-based artists: Abdulrahman AlMuftah, Farah Al Sidiky, Fatima Abbas, Guillaume Rouseré, Nada Elkharashi, Hind Al Saad and Sara Al Naimi. Far from the main exhibition, the Qatar Pavilion offers a sense of calm and peace, drawing from the Salat al Istisqa, a prayer performed in times of drought, to take visitors on a journey of praying for rain. It begins with the landscape of Qatar, as Fatima Abbas’s glimpse of rain (2024) shows a spectrum of colour reflecting a year of rain and drought. Next to it is Farah Al Sidiky’s two-channel video examining the narratives around deserts, entitled Place of Abandon (2024).
The journey then continues with depictions of praying, receiving, and bearing. Hind Al Saad’s so they rejoice (2024), a kinetic sculpture referencing religious text about the blessing of rain, is hypnotic in its calmness, while Abdulrahman Al Muftah’s Rain on Materiality (2024) reflects on the ephemeral nature of his patinated copper sheets. In a conversation with the Qatar Pavilion co-curator, Al-Shaima Ayoub, I reflected on two contrasting aspects of rain in the two collaborating regions. As much as rain is a rare occurrence and a sign of abundance in the Middle East, in East Asia it is sometimes a lesson in resilience.
Other exciting pavilions were shown at the Asia Culture Center (ACC). The ASEAN Pavilion’s Southeast Asia’s Green Legacy features an installation with living plants depicting the region’s biodiversity and coexistence. The Philippines Pavilion exhibited Locations of Freedom, featuring works that touch on the country’s forms of revolution while celebrating the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Korea and the Philippines. The Malaysian Pavilion showed Project Temporary Markings (2024) by Zulkefli Jais, a gigantic installation of vests as a reminder of the cyclical nature of history. In the same room, Jais wrote “HISTORY WILL REPEAT ITSELF,” which perhaps serves as reminder that politics will always be a part of the Gwangju Biennale. Just outside the ACC a banner hangs, on which is written: “WHAT ROLE CAN ART AND POETRY PLAY IN A FUTURE BUILT ON GENOCIDE?”
