18 May marks a watershed event in South Korea's ultimately successful pro-democracy movement - the 1980 Gwangju Uprising. As we come up on its 41st anniversary, I speak to Natasha Ginwala, co-Artistic Director, alongside Defne Ayas, of the 13th Gwangju Biennale (1 April 2021 - 9 May 2021). Against the backdrop of Gwangju's position as a cultural event with a revolutionary ethos, we unpack the philosophy driving this pandemic edition of the Biennale - notably through the work of Catherine Malabou, Yuk Hui, Maya Indira Ganesh, Djamila Ribeiro and others - and how it is incarnated in the works exhibited and practices platformed. We talk about how a biennale is mounted during a global quarantine, what the significance of organic and artificial or machinic intelligence is during an age of unreason as well as how the ghosts of history cause new political ruptures through the phenomenon of recursivity. We also touch upon the role of a biennale as a recorder of change and its paradoxical implication in the very orders it aims to challenge.
Click here to access the Image+ Guide and view the images and material being discussed in the podcast: https://sites.google.com/view/artalaap-podcast-resources/episode-7.
You can explore and experience the 13th Gwangju Biennale through:
- Its official website: https://13thgwangjubiennale.org/
- A downloadable guidebook [https://13thgwangjubiennale.org/pdf/13thGB-Guidebook-ENG-DEF.pdf]
- Instagram page [https://www.instagram.com/mindsrisingspiritstuning/]
Credits:
Producer: Tunak Teas
Design & artwork: Mohini Mukherjee
Marketing: Dipalie Mehta
Intern: Aastha Anupriya
Images: The 13th Gwangju Biennale
Audio courtesy: Vernouillet by Blue Dot Sessions [CC BY-NC 4.0]
Additional support: Kanishka Sharma, Amy Goldstone-Sharma, Raghav Sagar, Shalmoli Halder, Arunima Nair, Jayant Parashar.
References:
Okwui Enwezor, 'The Politics of Spectacle: The Gwangju Biennale and the Asian Century', Spectacle East Asia (Issue 15), Fall 2010.
Gi-Wook Shin, 'Introduction', Contentious Kwangju: The May 18th Uprising in Korea's Past and Present, eds. Gi-Wook Shin and Kyung Moon Hwang, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003.
'Stronger Than Bone', 13th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju Biennale Foundation and Archive Books, Berlin, 2021.
Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand, Fordham University Press, 2008.
Yuk Hui, 'Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics', e-flux Journal #86, 2017.
Vladan Joler & Kate Crawford, 'Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources', anatomyof.ai, 2018.
Mark Fisher, 'Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?', Zero Books, 2009.
Djamila Ribeiro, 'Black Feminism for a New Civilizational Framework', Sur: International Journal on Human Rights, trans. Murphy MacMahon, December 2016.
Maya Indira Ganesh, 'Between Flesh: Tech Degrees of Separation', Minds Rising, 13th Gwangju Biennale, August 2020.