Postponed 13th Gwangju Biennial Would Have Opened This Weekend

Image courtesy of Gwangju Biennale

This weekend would have marked the opening of the Gwangju Biennale, an institution that in its 25 years of existence has developed in a reference point globally for biennials and that holds a very special place in own history as International Biennial Association. Due to the ongoing Covid19 pandemic however, the organisers announced on May 11th the postponement of the exhibition opening from September 4th 2020 to February 26th 2021.

The 13th edition titled “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning” and curated by Defne Ayas and Natascha Ginwala, unfolds a critical reflection on the notion of superintelligence. Increasingly at the centre of a wide range of global discourses including but not limited to technology, and social behaviour, this term is mostly used within a machinic epistemology with a clear hierarchical system seeing the western, rational “intelligence” at its core. In the words of the curators, the complex program of exhibition, public events and online presence

“will delve into a broad set of cosmologies, activating planetary life-systems, queer technologies, and modes of communal survival. By investigating how such diverse practices transact with multitudinous forms of life, the 13th Gwangju Biennale will examine how they contend with the future horizon of cognitive capitalism and planetary imperialisms, as well as the present dimension of neural networks and other techno-spiritual emergences that populate our computational biosphere. We feel convinced—living as we are through a traumatic interregnum—that the present co-evolution with electronic intelligence and algorithmic regimes needs to be addressed from a planetary perspective. How then can we interpret the incomputable nature of this transition?” [Curatorial statement 13th Gwangju Biennial]

In the following days we will, through an interview recorded earlier this year, reflect with the curators as well as the director of the Gwangju Biennial Sunjung Kim on their decision and the complexity of realising a major exhibition during these extraordinary times.