As an art event, the Gwangju Biennale has a unique remit: to commemorate the horrific tragedy of the violently suppressed student-led uprising that took place in the city in May 1980. But for the 2024 Gwangju Biennale, unlike previous editions, this legacy was less of a central focus. Directed by French curator Nicolas Bourriaud, the event, mainly located in Gwangju’s Biennale Hall, instead is based on the idea of pansori, a Korean folk musical tradition whose name translates to “noise from the public space.” This theme brings together works from 72 artists to create a “soundscape of the 21st century,” according to the exhibition’s tagline. In sharp contrast with this year’s Venice Biennale, all of the participants are living.
Sound, as one might expect, features prominently in the show. Noel W. Anderson, for instance, cleverly splices James Brown songs into a supercut of the singer’s grunts and vocalizations, echoing through the exhibition’s stairway in a meditation on Black masculinity. Many of the works on view explore oppression and marginalization: issues, according to the curatorial framework, of taking up, and making noise, in public space. Climate change also features prominently in the artworks’ themes. The soundscape of the current moment, according to this show, is a lamentation for a world in crisis.
Elsewhere, in the various satellite pavilions spread across the city and running outside of the main show’s curatorial framework, some artists have taken on the mantle of the city’s history of political dissent. At the CDA Holon pavilion, a troupe of university student performers will march to the city’s Democracy Square once a week throughout the Biennale’s run, their choreography developed by the pavilion’s artists with movements based on state-sanctioned violence.
Here are the standout artists from the Gwangju Biennale 2024.
Mira Mann
B. 1993, Frankfurt, Germany. Lives and works in Düsseldorf.
Of all the art on view, Mira Mann’s work engages with the tradition of pansori most directly—particularly their installations that are scattered throughout an empty house in the Yangnim district. There, Mann’s video Mother may recall another (2022)—first presented at DREI in 2022—is shown on three TV screens set on the floor. The piece reinterprets the tale of Simcheongga. This typical pansori story of a daughter sacrificing herself in the Indang Sea to save her father from blindness is told obliquely, through meandering scenes of contemporary life shot in home video–style footage. The central character is played by the artist’s family members and other artists, as the traditional Korean story is sung on top.
Born to a Korean mother in Germany, Mann often explores the history of Korean immigration to their home country in their work. Another installation in the Biennale’s main location, a long dressing room–style mirror titled objects of the wind (2024), is a memorial to the many Korean nurses who immigrated to Germany in the late 1960s, bringing the Korean folk drumming tradition of pungmul with them. Jindo buk drums, alongside feathered fans and stainless steel instruments, adorn the monument.
Andrius Arutiunian
B. 1991, Vilnius, Lithuania. Lives and works in The Hague, Netherlands.
With the Gwangju Biennale’s focus on sound, it’s perhaps unsurprising that one of the standout artists would be a musician. Arutiunian is a composer as well as an artist, working with sonic dissent and personal histories of sound. In the main pavilion, his visually arresting work Below (2024) consists of five bitumen sculptures. These haunting, black gloop–covered discs atop speaker-height stands emit a low, rumbling audio that tugs at the edge of the viewer’s awareness. This sound is supposed to evoke the progress of the material as it bubbles up through the earth’s crust.
Elsewhere, in the Biennale’s hub in the Yangnim district, Arutiunian has taken over the tiny confines of the Podonamu Art Space with another sound-based work. There, the artist has recreated a 1940s harmonium performance by the legendary Armenian Greek mystic and composer George Gurdjieff, which he has slowed down to a five-hour piece. The work recalls an improvised performance in Gurdjieff’s niche mid-century Paris milieu, attempting to echo this human connection, decades later.
Beaux Mendes
B. 1987, New York. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Scanning the row of Beaux Mendes’s small paintings in the Biennale’s main show, it is difficult to place them as landscape paintings. But though these canvases seem devoid of sunlight—containing mostly ghostly gray or obscure dark brown shapes—they stem from a process that begins en plein air. The series on view, “Black Forest,” is named after an area in the south of Germany that inspired it.
Mendes comes from a long line of German rabbis, and their grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. They traveled to Germany to work in isolation on these shadowy works in both the Bavarian Forest and the Elbe Valley (beloved by Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich). Made with unusual mediums and techniques, such as marble powder and water marbling, these sometimes murky, shadowy works conjure an ambivalent image of the artist’s familial history of displacement from this land. They also subvert the history of Romantic landscape painting, which glamorized the natural world with depictions of sweeping vistas and was used to bolster the fascistic ethos of the Nazis.
Alex Cerveny
B. 1963, São Paulo. Lives and works in São Paulo.
In one of the upper galleries in the main Biennale pavilion, Alex Cerveny’s paintings depict a kind of historically informed, encyclopedic panorama gesturing to themes of historical international migration. In Terra Santa (2023), a hilly desert landscape is annotated with illustrations of bodies, plants, and alphabetical lists of names and places, drawing links between seemingly disparate themes, like Biblical plagues of Egypt and pop songs (“Yes Sir I Can Boogie,” “One Moment in Time”).
In the most recent work on view, the long, horizontal seascape Boat People (2024), Cerveny focuses on the migration of Vietnamese people following the Vietnam War. With its title and literary reference points (The Odyssey and Moby Dick) painted on a framing band at the top of the work, the sparsely illustrated scene draws fascinating links between the colonial history of seafaring and its mythological sources. Cyclops, for instance, is one of the monsters faced by Odysseus in Homer’s poem, but also the name of a ship lost at sea in 1918. It heads up a long list of historical shipwrecks that snakes down the center of the painting.
Yuyan Wang
B. 1989, Qingdao, China. Lives and works in Paris.
Thick sludge courses through Yuyan Wang’s new film Green Grey Black Brown (2024). Muddy petroleum bubbles in its crude form in clips of found aerial footage of crater-like oil fields. In close-ups, gigantic fingers place power lines next to miniature models of oil pumps. A creepily slowed-down version of Yes’s classic 1980s power anthem “Owner of a Lonely Heart” loops throughout the film, giving it a dark and surreal edge.
Presented in the main pavilion of the Gwangju Biennale, in a room carpeted wall to wall with fake plastic grass, the work splices together scenes of ecocide with scenes of artificial flower production on factory assembly lines. In Wang’s film, oil becomes plastic, which in turn becomes sad, faded versions of nature’s ripest beauty. The result is a hypnotic meditation on globalization and climate change.
Brianna Leatherbury
B. 1995, Woodbridge, Virginia. Lives and works in Amsterdam.
In a corner of one of the main Biennale hall’s upper floors stands a strange, boxed-off room that viewers enter through plastic food service–style curtains. Inside, under whirring air conditioners, buzzing strip lights, and antiseptic-feeling silver walls, are a series of sculptures. Made of parts of a priceless Dutch colonial wardrobe and plated in copper, this is the work of American artist Brianna Leatherbury.
For this installation, the artist based their sculptures on the prized possessions of stock market investors who lent them objects that “they would take to their grave,” according to the artist’s description. Titled Burden (2024), it’s part of Leatherbury’s series “Insiders’ Grave,” and of their wider research into the meaning of value and ownership over time. The sculptures are randomly stacked, as if unintended for public view, and appear broken-down and dilapidated. Their copper layers seem to be peeling and discolored despite their temperature-controlled and sanitized environment, evoking the futility of capitalist structures on a decaying and warming planet.
Gaëlle Choisne
B. 1985, Cherbourg, France. Lives and works in Paris and London.
French artist Gaëlle Choisne’s assemblage works assert the potentially healing role of art in documenting the trauma of the past. For example, Eat me softly (Black unicorn) (2024)—on view at the Gwangju Biennale’s main pavilion—features a photograph of a derelict building UV-printed onto concrete slabs and leaned against the gallery walls. Part of a series documenting the impact of natural disasters on Port-au-Prince, the work is intended to memorialize these atmospheric, uninhabited locations.
Nearby, melons and other fruit, printed with a Korean translation of an Audre Lorde poem, are scattered onto the floor in a kind of offering. The work’s concrete slabs, meanwhile, are tempered with salt—a substance traditionally used for purification, but which also erodes the image printed onto this typically tough material. These ritual images elicit grief for their subjects, ravaged by climate change.
Togar
B. 1987, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Lives and works in Yogyakarta.
The Gwangju Biennale’s national pavilions—though similar in theory to the state-organized pavilions of Venice—are, in fact, put together by outside sources and only loosely affiliated with their respective countries. Indonesia’s national pavilion has been organized by artist Julian Abraham, a.k.a. Togar, and consists of a casual, welcoming space in the Asia Culture Center. It’s filled with beanbags for jam sessions, an immersive work of cardboard boxes, and the artist’s own idiomatic signs, printed in bright neons. “You may say I’m a drummer, but I’m not the only one,” reads one, riffing on the famous John Lennon lyric in Ed Ruscha–esque capitals.
The artist’s work is also featured in the main exhibition, in the Horanggasinamu Art Polygon. Here, he has created another welcoming environment, with more of his signature signs (“I’ve always been a fella but I’ll never be a Kuti”) along with tinkling kinetic sculptures. The standout work is BIOSPOKE (2024), a thoughtful, single-channel video exploring the history of sound in cinema with interviews and performances that dissect how voices have appeared on screen across time.
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