IBA Stage: 14th Gwangju Biennale “soft and weak like water”

IBA Stage: 14th Gwangju Biennale
May 31th, 2023 (Wednesday)
8pm (Gwangju/GMT+9)

In the trajectory which lead to the creation of IBA, the 2012 World Biennial Forum held in Gwangju was certainly a keystone. Many things have changed since. IBA has grown from an initial occasion to gather to a dynamic platform for biennials to share their ideas and thoughts over the model. We are though of course extremely pleased to be given, over the years wonderful occasions to travel back to Gwangju to follow the development of the biennial with this year’s 14th edition titled “soft and weak like water”, envisioned by its artistic director Sook-Kyung Lee.

Inspired by a chapter of Dao De Jing, a fundamental Daoist text, which implies water’s capacity to embrace contradictions and paradoxes, the biennial proposes to imagine our shared planet as a site of resistance, coexistence, solidarity, and care, by thinking through the transformative and restorative potential of water as a metaphor, a force, and a method. It invites artists to engage with an alternative model of power that brings forth change, not with an immediate effect but with an enduring and pervasive gentleness that flows across structural divisions and differences.

Led by Sook-Kyung Lee, the Biennale brings together 79 artists from different corners of the globe and explores its theme through four nodes: Luminous Halo positions the spirit of Gwangju as a source of inspiration and model for resistance and solidarity; Ancestral Voices highlights transnational artistic approaches for engaging and reinterpreting traditions to question and challenge modernist ideas; Transient Sovereignty considers the ways in which post-colonial and de-colonial artistic thinking have developed in relation to issues such as migration and diaspora; and Planetary Times explores the limits and possibilities of a ‘planetary vision’ on ecological and environmental justice.

Aspiring to understand seemingly disparate yet equally urgent global issues as one entanglement that affects the whole planet and its inhabitants, soft and weak like water gives prominence to voices that speak about systems and practices of knowledge as alternatives to the ones governed by modernist thinking. Ranging from traditional healing, community-based and collective creation to reinterpretation of Indigenous crafts, the Biennale presents discourses and practices that highlight ways of existing together, which help locate solidarity in both our affinities and our singularities.

Sook-Kyung Lee’s curatorial team included Kerryn Greenberg (Art Historian and former Head of International Collection Exhibitions at Tate), Sooyoung Leam (Independent Curator and Art Historian) and Harry C. H. Choi (PhD candidate in art history at Stanford University)

As always IBA Stage events are meant as a moment to hear about a project through its makers and have the opportunity to participate in a Q&A session at the end of the presentation.

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