The tenth Gwangju Biennale

From protest to celebration

Sep 8th 2014, 9:52 by S.C.S. | GWANGJU, SOUTH KOREA

SOUTH KOREANS did not hear Talking Heads' hit album 'Burning Down the House' on its release in 1983. American pop was banned in a country that was straining under a military dictatorship. Three years earlier the regime had violently crushed a democratic uprising in Gwangju, a city in the south-west, in which thousands of students and citizens were arrested, died or went missing.

The Gwangju Biennale was established in their memory in 1995. The theme of this year’s tenth edition—“burning down the house”—covers the concepts of waste, destruction and renewal, as well as material change expressed through movement and dance. The contemporary-art exhibition engages with cultural loss and also glorifies the future; the process of burning is depicted as both protest and celebration. At the entrance to the main hall, four functioning cast-iron stoves, designed by Sterling Ruby, a German artist, illustrate many of the show’s themes.

Jessica Morgan, the Biennale’s artistic director and a curator at Tate Modern in London, has a refreshingly global take on a show that still attracts mostly Korean visitors. In the Biennale’s 8,000-square-metre hall, she exhibits the works of 103 artists from 38 countries, including 35 new pieces commissioned specifically for this event.

But it is a work by Minouk Lim, a South Korean, which sets the tone. Outside the hall stand two hulking grey containers that hold the remains of some victims of the Korean War of 1950-53, which were discovered in a mine in 2009. In a one-off performance on September 3rd the children of these victims carried the remains from an ambulance to the containers, blindfolded and guided by the parents of those who had died in the Gwangju uprising. Funeral rites were then performed for the first time.

Ms Lim’s work suggests that events that are highly historicised are also highly relevant today—and their stories are often unresolved. Swift political and economic changes in South Korea have given birth to a vibrant democracy, but latent forms of state control persist. One example surfaced, strikingly, at a sister exhibit to the Biennale called 'Sweet Dew—After 1980'. When a satirical painting of Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s president, was rejected, people cried censorship. Some artists removed their works in protest; others wondered whether theirs had “passed the censors”. The president of the Biennale’s foundation resigned, as did the exhibit's curator.

Ms Morgan herself has not shied away from provocation. Some of the Korean works in this year's Biennale are especially subversive: Lee Bul’s 'Abortion', in which the artist hangs upside down, naked, from a rope while reciting a monologue, recalls the physical torture and psychological terror of the 1980s, when Ms Lee first performed her work as a member of the pro-democracy movement. Visitors reflect on the militarisation of political structures elsewhere with works by Jane Alexander, a South African artist, and Eko Nugroho, an Indonesian artist. At once chilling and carnivalesque, 'The Ozymandias Parade', by Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, depicts the dehumanising effect of propaganda. A military president wears a mask that carries the answer to a poll carried out in whichever location the work is shown. “Are you satisfied with your government?” goes the question. Here, in South Korea, the answer is a bold, black “NO”.

The burning house can represent an institution, a social construct or indeed the status quo. Ms Morgan reveals her keen interest in gender and sexuality with works by Renate Bertlmann of Austria, Nil Yalter, an Egyptian who documents her former partner’s sex change, and “House of Shame”, a subversive work by A.A. Bronson, a Canadian, that is contained in a pagoda in the Biennale’s parks.

Ms Morgan abandons contemporary art’s familiar white-cube surrounds, and thus 'burns down the house' in her own way. She shuns white walls for a digital smoke-and-flame motif, a backdrop that lends energy to the cavernous galleries and the artwork they contain. Perhaps the most inviting work on display is the Biennale’s own house: Urs Fischer, a Swiss artist, reproduces his entire New York apartment, to scale, on 3D hyperrealist wallpaper. Ms Morgan intends visitors to follow a 'curve of emotion' as they make their way through the exhibit, from darker rooms about state control to those on 'joyful protest'. But the fact that they pass Ms Lim's rusting containers on the way out of the Biennale ensures that they take with them some sombre questions about South Korea's unrecognised losses. 

The Gwangju Biennale runs until November 9th 2014