Where the exhibition moves outside Asia, it is mostly to showcase artists from non-first world countries
Two-thirds of the 163 artists participating in the Gwangju Biennale’s 12th edition come from Asia, and Koreans figure strongly among them. Where the Biennale moves outside the region, it is mostly to showcase the work of artists from non-first world countries, including Cuba, Brazil and Lebanon. While past editions have been overseen by a single international star — Harald Szeemann, Okwui Enwezor and Massimiliano Gioni among them — this one comprises seven exhibitions, assembled by no fewer than 11 curators. The truly remarkable thing about it is its coherence: the notion of a border may be used in many different ways, but both across exhibitions and within each one, the idea is never far away.
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The show opens with Imagined Nations/Modern Utopias, a highly original exhibition curated by Tate Modern’s Clara Kim that reflects on postwar modernist architectural projects in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. It was an era of nation-building, when the likes of Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer had carte blanche to create whole new cities, but, as Kim notes, for the generations born in the 1960s through to the 1980s, the modernist project was often “anything but heroic”.
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Film and photography dominate this show. It is worth taking time over works such as Amie Siegel’s lyrically shot video, which explores the global trade in modernist furniture by working backwards from auctions and collectors, through restorers, to the none too well cared for pieces by Le Corbusier that remain in their original home in Chandigarh, India.
Gridthiya Gaweewong’s show Facing Phantom Borders harks back to the first Gwangju Biennale in 1995, seeking out, as she put it, the stories of “people from the margins”. In that show, titled Beyond Borders, artists were responding to the mass mobility unleashed by globalisation and the mood was, above all, hopeful. Today, the agony of an asylum seeker glimpsed in the shadows in Agnieszka Kalinowska’s film Draughty House (2009) who cries, “We can’t live in Afghanistan — that is why we came here, to be alive” is more appropriate. Or the words springing from blue water in a Sawangwongse Yawnghwe painting: “Which way to land?”
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