Curated by Jessica Morgan
Responding to the loaded context underpinning Gwangju’s biennial—inaugurated to commemorate the 1980 massacre of Korean civilians protesting military dictatorship—Jessica Morgan borrows a title from the band Talking Heads for this year’s iteration, foregrounding the idea that with destruction comes renewal. The exhibition, which fills five vast halls and surrounding grounds with contributions by some one hundred participants, opens with a work by Korean artist Minouk Lim, who presents a container filled with the biological remains of Korean War casualties—the “bones of near history,” Morgan writes. Promising to expand this cycle of mourning and recrimination is the dialogue set to transpire between such locally derived works and those of lesser-known international names who are in fact icons in their regions: Turkey’s Gülsün Karamustafa, for example, or India’s Mrinalini Mukherjee. In such company, the work of familiar Western figures such as Jeremy Deller and Urs Fischer may find new meanings as well.
