The absence of context in a biennial whose stated aims quickly become lost in translation leaves far too many questions unanswered
Look it up on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage website and you’ll find that pansori is a Korean musical genre. It began as a form of public storytelling during the seventeenth century, having evolved, most likely, from the narrative songs of shamans. The word is also the title of this year’s Gwangju Biennale, under the artistic direction of French curator Nicolas Bourriaud. Its meaning in this context is a little less straightforward.
The wall text that welcomes you to the twin bunkers that make up the Biennale Exhibition Hall declares that Pansori, the biennial, is going to be an ‘operatic exhibition about the space we live in’. In one fell swoop, a unique musical performance that originated in Korea has been translated into a theatrical art form that evolved in Europe a hundred years earlier. The space of pansori, we are told, is a ‘relational space’ shared between ‘humans, machines, animals, spirits, and organic life’; a reminder, perhaps, that Bourriaud remains best known for coining the term ‘relational aesthetics’ in the 1990s to describe art production informed by human interaction. Then, before you can blink, the nature of space itself is on the table. The text declares that all landscapes are soundscapes, and that, as a result, the musical and the visual are connected. And that this relationship is also what the exhibition is really about. At this point, you might have begun to realise that all of this is an extension of that earlier urge to translate (which should also, in turn, trigger questions about the relationship between translation and definition). With this logic in place, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the exhibition has become a space that denies common sense in its entirety. Although that perspective probably gets to the core of what most people think contemporary art is all about.
Getting back to the point – even if identifying what that might be has already become a topic of some confusion – the text finally declares that the two hangul characters that make up the word pansori ‘mean “the noise [sori] from the public space [pan]” which might also be translated as the voice of the subalterns’. At this stage of the translation game you might either be thinking that pansori means everything or that it means nothing. Perhaps, after a certain point, the two amount to the same thing here anyway.
But there’s no time to quibble over linguistics. Next up is a walk through a dark tunnel and into the bright lights of the exhibition proper. Emeka Ogboh’s Oju 2.0 (2022), an ambient soundtrack made up, I later learn, of interviews and field recordings carried out in Lagos, guides you through the darkness. Or even further into it. At once here (Gwangju) and there (Lagos). Perhaps ultimately nowhere? Traffic is alluded to along with the general hubbub that results from urban saturation, but, as a whole, it’s a kind of white noise: ultimately unidentifiable. Is this what the voice of the subalterns sounds like to those in power? You are left to wonder.
The bright lights at the end of the tunnel belong to Cinthia Marcelle’s Não existe mais lugar neste lugar [There Is No More Space In This Place] (2019–24), which is an empty carpeted office-type space in which the ceiling tiles are precariously displaced in a manner that might be reflective of the passing of a natural disaster – or an individual who violently objected to standardisation in the construction industry. On a rainy day, such as the one on which I visited, the dark industrial carpeting picks up the mud from visitors’ shoes in a manner that only enhances the sense of despoilation. After that, Peter Buggenhout’s assemblies of what look like bombed out or decaying architecture – pipes, reinforcement bars and dust covered, leathery skins – feel like overkill and more than a little redundant, given that any news channel right now is going to give you plentiful imagery of similar desolation in the ‘real’ world.
More effective are a collection of collages by Kandis Williams from a series titled gods and monsters that white people make up to kill us all (2024) that feature (white) pop-cultural horror characters such as Patrick Bateman, Freddy Krueger, Ghostface and Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, intermixed with images of Black bodies working sugar plantations and Black boxers, soldiers, revolutionaries and movie stars. Williams does this in such a way that fact and fiction blend into some sort of Frankensteinian whole, as do the performed and the real, both of which speak to the ongoing legacy of the colonial imagination and the colonising effects of the entertainment industry.
The work finds echoes in Choi Haneyl’s sculptural installation Crying Uncle’s Room (2024), which is something of a horror show itself. Featuring body sections and body parts that are packed onto what look like giant circuit boards or the equally large versions of the white polystyrene trays you might find in a butcher’s shop, at times they rise up, suspended as a cacophony of arms and intestines and legs that nevertheless feel recognisably disembodied as much as they are obvious embodiments. The aura is of something that has been alienated from itself. Sung Tieu’s sonic and sculptural installation System’s Void (2024) incorporates large black pipes that have been inserted into a sandy desert landscape suggesting that what the body is being subjected to in Haneyl’s work is also being faced by the land (it’s not quite clear if the pipes relate to extraction or insertion, but to do the one thing you generally have to perform the other). Tieu’s work later finds an aesthetic echo in that of Bianca Bondi, an installation, The Long Dark Swim (2024), featuring a stagelike space carved out of white sand dunes, featuring a swimming-pool- like hole (complete with swimming pool ladder) out of which emerge a ring of green fronds.
Meanwhile, another installation, by Düsseldorf-based Mira Mann, objects of the wind (2024), centres around a horizontal landscape of illuminated makeup mirrors and photographs of pungmul performances. On top of a stainless steel shelf has been placed novels, photographs, empty tea cups, nurses’ hats, feather headdresses, gongs and various references to nursing schools and medicine: taken as a whole, the work is a meditation on the Korean nurses who took up jobs in West Germany during the 1960s and 70s, both to earn money and to escape the strictures of the oppressive regime in their homeland. But it’s the feeling of self-reflection and of the identities we maintain or construct that pervades here. It’s in these types of echoes (in this case with the work of Williams), or moments of calls and responses, work to work, that the exhibition is at its strongest.
But the fact that none of the works on show have been offered much in the way of contextual labelling means that viewers, for the most part, are left to work things out through formal or aesthetic analysis alone. And while this might place a greater emphasis on the artist’s skills as a storytellers, it also tends to feel a little disconcerting, leaving unclear too many questions regarding the artist’s intentions and motivations, as well as more layered meanings. On the one hand this can mean that you wander around the show wondering if it’s presenting a theory that is looking to be proven; on the other, you wonder whether it might be the facts of the works themselves that are in search of a theory. There is, of course, the rare moment when a body of work stands out on its own, in this case a pair of videos by Hyeongsuk Kim, in an offsite space in the Yangnim district. New Home (2018) and The House is Black (2024) explore the changing identity of the artist’s hometown of Nanju (while the Korean artist was living in Berlin) as original residents were replaced by wealthy newcomers and government planning transformed the town’s fabric.
And there are times when haziness isn’t necessarily a bad thing; indeed, it’s a feature of works such as Netta Laufer’s 35cm (2017–18), a series of surveillance photographs documenting small mammals that pass through passages in the border walls of the West Bank, obtaining a level of freedom that humans on the ‘wrong’ side don’t have, while making themselves more vulnerable to predation. Perhaps, in the end, the overriding vagueness is a close approximation to what it’s like to look at things in the world outside of exhibition halls, reinforced by the blurring boundaries here as sounds bleed from one artwork into the space of another (most of the works noted above are from a section titled ‘Feedback Effect’ that talks about a world that is ‘contiguous, contagious and immediate’). But that’s the ‘real’ world; why would anyone go to an exhibition to experience that?
5th Gwangju Biennale: Pansori – A Soundscape of the 21st Century, Various venues, Gwangju, 7 September – 1 December
