For the last twenty-three years, the Gwangju Biennale has emerged as a network for international cultural exchanges and a platform for the visual arts, while producing discourses on contemporary art. Located in the South West of the Korean peninsula, Gwangju has been known for its historical tradition of art and culture.
Few in the West would have heard of the Gwangju Uprising—a South Korean massacre that began in 1980 as a peaceful, pro-democratic protest and resulted in 2,000 deaths after the government imposed martial law across the country.
The Gwangju Uprising turned out to be a major stepping stone towards South Korea’s transition from a militarized and deeply oppressive autocracy to the vibrant, internationalist and progressive democracy of today.
This year, as South Korea confronts the legacy of the uprising four decades later, the biennial will “respond in quite direct terms” to how the event remains “live, non-historicised and tangible,” say the co-artistic directors Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala.
The biennial, titled Minds Rising Spirits Tuning, opens this week and includes 69 participating artists, many from Korea and the surrounding region such as the documentary photographer Gap-Chul Lee and the painter Sangho Lee, with 41 new commissions at numerous sites throughout the city.
A key aspect of Ayas and Ginwala’s curation has been an engagement with the Gwangju archive, “a minute-to-minute chronicle of the uprising, and a granular example of how a civic movement can be memorialised and archived,” Ginwala says. “The role of journalists, the role of mothers and the role of students—they’re all chronicled in that archive.” This, Ayas says, helped the biennial to confront “the hierarchy of suffering, the question of who gets remembered, and how they are remembered—as victims, or as heroes.”
Gwangju Biennale: Minds Rising Spirits Tuning, will be showcased at various venues in Gwangju from 1 April-9 May 2021.