If that first Biennale celebrated the dawn of globalization, the most recent one (on view through November 11) is more solemn and circumspect, having borne witness to globalization’s consequences—the rise of right-wing regimes, the sealing up of borders, increased policing and surveillance. The Biennale’s 165 artists, whose work is displayed in seven separate exhibitions helmed by eleven curators, served as mediums, channeling stories and myths and demanding a reexamination of history.

Architecture-as-ghost is a theme throughout. The first major space in the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall contains curator Clara Kim’s “Imagined Nations/Modern Utopias” section, where references to Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh and Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília abounded. Today such modernist constructions appear as eerie, dilapidated monoliths, Kim’s curating emphasizes, but artists are investigating the ways in which they’ve been repurposed. Clarissa Tossin’s Brasília by Foot (2009–13), for example, uses Google Earth images and drawings to trace pedestrian footpaths through the planned capital city’s grid, highlighting informal settlements inhabited by the thousands of migrant workers who built the city. In photographs documenting figurines and other artifacts that have been sealed away in deep storage in the Kuwait National Museum, Alia Farid’s Between Dig and Display (2017) showcases a monument to failed modernity.

Elsewhere, artists demonstrate how architectural plans can be relieved of their functionality, and iconic buildings can be the sites of myth-making.

....