Gwangju Biennale (South Korea) | Biennial Foundation

Source: www.gb.or.kr/?mid=main_eng
Organisation: Gwangju Biennale Foundation
Year founded: 1995

The Gwangju Biennale in South Korea is Asia's oldest biennial of contemporary art.

Founded in 1995 in memory of spirits of civil uprising of the 1980 repression of the Gwangju Democratization Movement, the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea is Asia’s oldest biennial of contemporary art. The Gwangju Biennale shows contemporary art under a theme along with special guest exhibitions and various performances.

Centered around the Biennale Hall in Gwangju’s Jungoui Park, the Gwangju Biennale reflects the growing interest in Asian art, culture and Asia’s new cities and culture trends.

Biennale titles have included Beyond the Borders (1995), Unmapping the Earth (1997), Man + Space (2000), Pause (2002), A Grain of Dust, A Drop of Water (2004), Fever Variations (2006) and Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions (2008), 10,000 Lives (2010). Curators have included: Kerry Brougher, Sukwon Chang, Okwui Enwezor, Massimiliano Gioni, Charles Esche, Hou Hanru, Honghee Kim, Yongwoo Lee, Youngchul Lee, Kwangsoo Oh, Wankyoung Sung, and Harald Szeemann.

Zhao Shutong, Wang Guanyi and the Rent Collection Courtyard collective, Rent Collection Courtyard, 1974-78, 100 copper plated fiberglass sculptures. Gwangju Biennale, 2010. Photo: MVH.

News

Gwangju Biennale Foundation

149-2 Yongbong-dong, Buk-gu
Gwangju
Korea
T: +82 062 608 4114

biennale@gb.or.kr
www.gb.or.kr

Ai Wei Wei and Seung H-Sang, co-directors 4th Gwangju Design Biennale 2011 2010-11-21

The Gwangju Biennale Foundation has appointed Seung H-Sang, a Korean architect, and Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist and architectural designer, as co-directors of the 4th Gwangju Design Biennale. Eight curators and two designers have also been appointed for six major sections of the thematic exhibition. The 4th Gwangju Design Biennale will be held at the Biennale Exhibition Hall and throughout the metropolitan city of Gwangju from September 2nd to October 23rd 2011.

Seung H-Sang has completed Paju Book City project in Korea, and he has gained international recognitions through projects like Guggenheim Pavilion in Abu Dhabi, Chao-Wei SOHO project in Beijing as well as Korea DMZ Peace-Life Valley, the graveyard of late former President Roh Moo-hyun and Commune by the Great Wall. He served as a commissioner of Korean Pavilion for Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008. He operates the architectural firm, Iroje, which he established in 1989.

Ai Weiwei is influential artist, curator, social commentator and activist. His ground-breaking work Sunflower Seeds was recently presented at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. The work consisted of 100 million porcelain seeds, each individually hand painted by 1,600 Chinese artisans. Ai's work has been exhibited in the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Guangzhou Triennial, the Biennale of Sydney among others. He served as creative consultant with the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & De Meuron for their "bird's nest" Beijing Olympic Stadium project.

The theme of 4th Gwangju Design Biennale is dogadobisangdo (圖可圖非常圖, Design is Design is not Design), and will be divided into 6 different sections. Dogagobisangdo will reinterpret the boundaries between design and non-design, and look back and explain a variety of design concepts that determine the value of civilized society or are recognized as absolute accessories. The exhibition theme, inspired by the first words in 'Do Duk Kyeong (Tao Te Ching, 道德經)' of No Ja (Lao Tzu, 老子) - 'The way道 that is the way is not always the way. The name名 that is the name is not always the name.', throws a complex question to the viewers with the interpretation of 'design is design is not always design and non-design is non-design is not always non-design'.

The sections of the exhibition theme and their curators, designers and coordinators are as follows: Academy and Thematic Installation. (Curator: Pai Hyungmin) ; Section 1: Named Design. (Curator: Minsuk Cho, Anthony Fontenot) ; Section 2: Unnamed Design. (Curator: Brendan McGetrick) ; Section 3: Urban Follies. (Curator: Kim Youngjun, Ramon Prat) ; Section 4: Community. (Curator: Beatrice Galilee, Youngjune Kiehm) ; Biennale City. (Designer: Francisco Sanin, Jaejun Lee).
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Gwangju Biennale announces 2012 Artistic Directors. 2011-04-26

The Gwangju Biennale Foundation is delighted to announce the appointment of Sunjung Kim, Mami Kataoka, Carol Yinghua Lu, Nancy Adajania, Wassan Al-Khudhairi, and Alia Swastika as Joint Artistic Directors of the 9th Gwangju Biennale 2012. For the first time, the Biennale has appointed a group of six young Asian women curators to co-direct the exhibition and program. The Gwangju Biennale Foundation has not selected Asian female curators in order to display the political, cultural, or geopolitical hegemony of Asia. Instead, through their appointment, Gwangju Biennale seeks to build a platform that can embrace layers of diverse and engaging discussions in visual culture. As the oldest and most prestigious biennale of Asia, Gwangju Biennale hopes to provide an opportunity to rethink and reexamine the anthropological and aesthetic positioning of Asia. Breaking away from past regional and global conflicts and the constant collision between truth and information, Gwangju Biennale proposes to discover a new grammar of communication unique to the Biennale.

The Artistic Directors of 9th Gwangju Biennale are young and internationally renowned curators in Korea, China, Japan, India, South-East Asia, and the Middle East. Rather than driven by political ideology or systemic concerns, these curators will engage both the autonomous language of art and the active communication networks of civil society to produce the exhibition and audience participation programs. The Gwangju Biennale will maintain a commitment to the democratic values of social consensus and human rights long supported by the Foundation, as well as create a space for aesthetic discourse.

• Sunjung Kim is a Seoul-based independent curator and Professor at the Korea National University of Arts. From 1993 to 2004, Kim was the Chief Curator at Artsonje Center in Seoul. In 2005, she was the commissioner of the Korean Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale. The first festival, titled “Somewhere in Time,” was followed by “Tomorrow” (2007), “I have nothing to say and I am saying it” (2008), “Platform in KIMUSA: Void of Memory” (2009) and “Projected Image” (2010). Most recently, Kim was the Artistic Director of the 6th Seoul International Media Art Biennale – Media City Seoul 2010.

• Mami Kataoka is a curator and writer and has been the Chief Curator of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, since 2003. From 2007–2009, Kataoka joined the curatorial team at the Hayward Gallery in London as the first international curator. During her tenure at the Mori Art Museum, Kataoka has curated a number of exhibitions, including “Ozawa Tsuyoshi: Answer with Yes and No!” (2004), “All About Laughter: Humor in Contemporary Art” (2006), “Ai Weiwei: According to What?” (2009) and most recently “Sensing Nature: Perception of Nature in Japan” (2010).

• Carol Yinghua Lu is a curator and writer who lives and works in Beijing. She is a contributing editor for Frieze and co-founder and co-editor of Contemporary Art & Investment magazine. She writes frequently for international art journals and magazines including e-flux journal, The Exhibitionist, Yishu, and Tate. Her texts on contemporary art have also appeared in many art catalogues, books, publications, and critical readers. From 2005–2007, she was the China researcher for Asia Art Archive. From 2009–2010, she was the founder and Art Director of SUITCASE ART PROJECTS, a project space of Today Art Museum.

• Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist, art critic and independent curator, based in Bombay. She was educated in Politics, Social Communications Media, and Film. She has written and lectured extensively on extended sculpture, new media, public art and transcultural art practice (including at Documenta 11, Kassel; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Transmediale, Berlin; Lottringer 13, Munich; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Kuenstlerhaus Wien, Vienna; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; Soma Museum, Korea; Wuerttembergische Kunstverein, Stuttgart; The Danish Contemporary Art Foundation, Copenhagen; and BAK, Utrecht). Adajania was Editor-in-Chief of Art India magazine.

• Wassan Al-Khudhairi is the director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, since 2010, responsible for developing the newly established institution and managing the development of its new building. She also oversees policy development, acquisitions and collections registration. As a curator, she specializes in modern and contemporary art from the Arab world, with a particular emphasis on Iraq. She is of Iraqi origin and has lived in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the U.K. and the U.S., where she worked at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York.

• Alia Swasticka is a curator, project manager, and writer based in Jakarta. From 2002–2004, Swasktika worked as Associate Editor for SURAT newsletter, published by the Cemeti Art Foundation, which led to her curatorial debut at the Cemeti Art House, where she worked as an Artistic Manager from 2004–2009. In the meantime, she joined staff exchange programme in UfaFabrik, Berlin, Germany with a grant from Asia Europe Foundation (ASEF), and the same program funded by Kelola Foundation and Asian Cultural Council. Since 2008, she has been working for Ark Galerie in Jakarta and has recently been appointed as a curator of the upcoming Jogja Biennale XI in November.

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The 9th Gwangju Biennale: "Roundtable". 2012-01-04

The team of the six co-artistic directors appointed to organize the upcoming biennale have chosen ‘ROUNDTABLE’ as a theme to explore the possibility of democratic and non-hierarchical exchange concerning global cultural production, through various forms of collective endeavour, research into historic entanglements among societies, and the exploration of diverse contexts of belonging.
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