The 11th edition of the Gwangju Biennale merges philosophical notions with an examination of the recent political history of the South Korean city. Art provides questions “that you carry with you as you encounter the exhibition. It has reverberations; it creates rings on water,” the event’s curator, Maria Lind, told reporters at the opening of the show. Lind, the director of Tensta Konsthall, a contemporary art gallery in Stockholm, added that contemporary art “is the only form of understanding… that includes all of the others”.
The show’s title, The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?), is taken from an idea first postulated by the 12th-century Persian mystic Sohrevardi and re-examined centuries later by Henry Corbin, a French professor of Islamic studies who died in 1978. Sohrevardi believed that there was a realm between the spiritual and the natural worlds, beyond the seven terrestrial climate regions identified by the ancient Greeks. This domain is real but eludes our normal perception; to discover it, we must enter “an intermediary state between waking and sleeping”, as Corbin put it.
Despite these abstract theories, much of the work on display is firmly grounded in real events that took place on 18 May 1980, when this sleepy South Korean city was the site of an anti-government student protest that quickly deteriorated into a massacre. By some estimates, more than 600 people—students and other citizens who had joined them—were killed by the military government over four days. The event sowed the seeds of democracy in South Korea and commemorating it is part of the Gwangju Biennale’s mandate.
The Spanish artist Dora García’s re-creation of a 1980s bookshop that was a centre for the democracy movement in Gwangju dominates the first hall of the biennial’s venue. The installation contains replicas of relics of the 18 May movement, such as watches worn by the students, and also includes protest messages about the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster, which claimed 304 lives and remains a focal point in Korean politics. Outside the Biennale Hall, works are dotted around the city at sites significant to the 18 May uprising.
In the main exhibition, the Bangladeshi photographer Munem Wasif has contributed a photographic series entitled Land of Undefined Territory (2016). It captures the barren landscapes of the borderlands between India and Bangladesh, where clashes have rendered the land unidentifiable. His desolate quarries contrast with the gem-like sculptures of The Gwangju Rocks (2016), based on decorative rocks around the city, by the Danish artist Tommy Støckel.
Stones, land, excavation, demolition and construction feature heavily, revealing how the corruption of nature alienates people from land and place. The sculptures of the Chinese Mongolian artist Na Buqi evoke the region’s mountains and turn street-level bustle into abstracted forms. Gallery four is given over almost entirely to abstract pieces, such as the Iranian-born artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s ornate mirror mosaics. Shrouded in darkness, the second hall is dedicated to videos interspersed with the Seoul-born, New York-based artist Anicka Yi’s four disconcertingly glitzy quarantine tents.
Standout films include the Korean video artist Jeamin Cha’s Fog and Smoke (2012), which intersperses interviews tracing South Korea’s property boom and bust of the mid-2000s with a tap dancer, and the Korean artist Bona Park’s 1967_2015 (2015), in which sound effects recall a 1967 mining accident that buried a child for 15 days before his eventual rescue.
By and large, the exhibition’s curator has chosen subtle, contemplative works with a strong focus on abstraction. “This [edition] is not about spectacle, with big works that try to fill the exhibition space,” says Biljana Ciric, a Shanghai-based curator who organised the Ural Industrial Biennial in Russia. It remains to be seen how the public will respond to the show. “In Asia, they are used to the kind of spectacular, easily consumed works that this exhibition tries to resist,” Ciric says.