The Generic Totality of the Gwangju Biennale

My first impression of the 15th Gwangju Biennale, ‘PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century’, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, came in the form of a pansori performance on the eve of the exhibition opening: in a small neighbourhood bar, French artist Saâdane Afif had gathered an intimate crowd to enjoy the presence of Sora Kim, one of South Korea’s foremost pansori divas. She graciously entertained the audience with a 30-minute English-language performance, reciting not Korean folk tales but poetry by international artists while the crowd, as per pansori custom, yelled encouragement.

For biennales that cite local aesthetic traditions as inspiration, it is always risky to include the ‘real thing’, for it often exposes the insularity, not the porosity, of contemporary art as a cultural form. And indeed, this biennale quickly frays at its conceptual edges. Per the press release, the exhibition is concerned with spaces, ranging from the urban to the microbial and even the cosmic, and the noises they emit. The scope is too vast: those looking forward to a curatorial exemplar of the ‘sonic’ or ‘percussive’ turn in contemporary art are left hungry for more, for the biennale engages the auditory only as a vague, intermittent motif.

This shortcoming is most evident in the exhibition’s first section, devoted to ‘feedback’, which the wall text tells us is a phenomenon generated ‘by the lack of space between two emitters: a sonic consequence of saturation’. Again, a ripe metaphor, but one that quickly grows quiet – literally – after the exhibition’s first work, Emeka Ogboh’s blacked-out tunnel of urban clatter (Oju 2.0, 2022). The show proceeds to transport us through myriad ‘sites’ that, contrary to the curatorial intention, feel neither crowded nor cacophonous: Cinthia Marcelle’s corporate dystopias are eerily quiet (Não existe mais lugar neste lugar, There Is No More Place in This Place, 2019–24), while Peter Buggenhout’s mega-sized sculptural composites are cast as urban rubble but without its denizens (King Louie, 2018–23). Fractal light glows from Na Mira’s meandering video projection of the US Army Garrison in Yongsan, where colonial ghosts linger (수궁가/Sugungga (Hello), 2024). Upstairs, Dora Budor takes us on a fever-ridden tour of a privately developed park on the West Side of Manhattan (Passive Recreation, 2024), and Anastasia Sosunova folds the history of 1990s Lithuanian neocapitalism into a road trip (DIY, 2023).

If these are indeed topological works – at minimum, about ‘spaces’ of some kind – their didactic presentation quickly makes viewers’ eyes glaze over. Sound works are present, yes, but they are often siloed into separate rooms or off-site locations, where they fail to dominate, to really be noisy. Instead, a walk through ‘PANSORI’ yields a conspicuous flow of the world’s (and, towards the end, the entire universe’s) surfaces, with media, matter and people rendered in an unjustified range of styles. The openness of such a showcase makes for generic totality – the cosmos in general – which unmoors the exhibition from the world it is trying to interrogate. When so many spaces are addressed, the show implicitly becomes not about those spaces but about travelling between them, a kind of simulation tourism through media fragments with few relational implications for the visitor. This, of course, is no new paradox, but the condition of global art since the 1990s.

Still, there is good art, a lot of it actually – the kind strong enough to stand alone without high-falutin discursive frames. Haneyl Choi’s compulsive plastic encasings of materials (Crying Uncle’s Room, 2024) uncannily confuse fleshy bodies with mannequins, a queer inversion of Matthew Angelo Harrison’s encased ethnological artefacts further along in the show (Tip of the Tongue, 2021). Echoing Harrison, Gaëlle Choisne’s photo-printed slabs of concrete are forcefully ‘strapped in’ to the gallery wall as if they were objects in history museums (Stèles, Port-au-Prince, Haïti-colonnades, 2024), while Mira Mann – whose two sculptural presentations about Korean nurses in Cold War Germany are an undoubted highlight of the biennale – lures in the viewer with a work resembling an abandoned film set (objects of the wind, 2024).

In this geographical vortex, the most successful works are unsurprisingly those that problematize what space and its representation even are in the first place. Sung Tieu’s sonic spatialization of bureaucratic data opacity regarding oil fracking in contemporary America (System’s Void, 2024) denies the viewer neat impressions of its subject matter and points to the complexity of imaging in our data-driven contemporary moment. Further in the exhibition, we enjoy the triumphant return of Katja Novitskova, whose towering screen of rapidly flickering images of animals caught in trail cameras (Patterns of Activation, gardens of the galaxy, 2021–ongoing) poses a pressing question: are artists always spatially situated, or are they mere alienated internet users, like the rest of us?

Tieu’s work, a desert-like diorama ominously illuminated by a digital clock, is effective because it dares to acknowledge and respond to the theatricality of the only space that Bourriaud’s biennale systematically ignores: that of contemporary art, which is the one we happen to be in. This is a shame, not only because of his past theorization of this exact topic (see: relational aesthetics), but also because he has a clear knack for celebrating the distinctive traits of contemporary art, namely, its cultural sitelessness, its artifice. In Gwangju, the viewer is best advised to relinquish herself to a series of large-scale, phantasmagorical installations by Bianca Bondi, Max Hooper Schneider, Mimi Park, Jura Shust and Brianna Leatherbury, and others, which most of all feel like theatrical or cinematic sets. These are not windows into or ‘about’ worlds but worlds in themselves: fake spaces that are lush, joyful and speculative exactly in their obvious artifice. They are the kind of spaces that only contemporary art – still – can make accessible to the public. Here, we get a taste of what Bourriaud had perhaps intended with the theme of pansori: an opera you can walk through. This is in itself a refreshing idea, but one that only begins to take form in Gwangju.

15th Gwangju Biennale, ‘PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century’ is on view until 1 December 2024

^{Main image: Saadia Mirza, ‘PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century’, exhibition view, 2024. Courtesy: the artist and the 15th Gwangju Biennale}