15th Gwangju Biennale, “PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century”

The main exhibition of the 15th Gwangju Biennale is entered via a gloomy “sound tunnel” filled with dissonant noise and leading into a silent room resembling an abandoned office space. The ceiling tiles of Cinthia Marcelle’s installation There Is No More Place in This Place (2019–24) are disarrayed as if by some natural disaster, and the scrambling of the senses effected by these two environments marks a promising start to an exhibition that pledges to “reflect our new spatial conditions and the upheavals of the Anthropocene.”1

The central show at Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall is spread across five floors that the visitor ascends from ground level.2 The atmosphere in its lower reaches is apocalyptic, exhausted, and dystopian, an aesthetic of broken wires and fragmentary ruins gathered under a dismal light and typified by an impressive series of monumental sculptures by Peter Buggenhout resembling John Chamberlain’s junked cars. Yet where the American artist conjured both the joy of the open road and the horror of the high-speed crash, Buggenhout’s crumpled architectures set the tone for the opening’s relatively narrow—and notably dour—emotional register.

Their collective title, “The Blind Leading the Blind,” neatly captures the impression that visitors to an exhibition curated by Nicolas Bourriaud with Sophia Park, Kuralai Abdukhalikova, and Barbara Lagié will be forced to stumble around in the dark for meaning. This invitation to embrace uncertainty and engage different modes of perception (as the title suggests, there is a strong emphasis on sound) feels apt to the historical moment, and put me in mind of Marianne Moore’s proposal in “Poetry” that readers losing their faith in literature might move through texts like a “bat, / holding on upside down or in quest of something to / eat.”3 On the flipside, it also hints that the biennale as a whole might not have any clear sense either of where it is going or how it might get there.

The second floor is the strongest section at this central site. Netta Laufer’s compelling 25ft (2016) comprises a video installation and still photographs repurposing surveillance footage from the border wall with Palestine, picking out the wild animals whose presence accentuates the inherently unnatural character of such divisions. Yet the sound bleed from the video upsets the delicate balance between Andrius Arutiunian’s Below (2024) and Sung Tieu’s System’s Void (2024) in an intelligently twinned installation on the far side of a thin partition. The disruption of borders is clearly intended to serve a curatorial point—Bourriaud has enlisted “echoes, overlaps and chords” between elements in his “operatic” design for the exhibition, adjusting the volume of sound and video works to serve an overarching “soundscape”—but this gesture is here to the disservice of the work.4

In a neighboring space, Dora Budor’s Passive Recreation (2024) presents a video shot on a Manhattan cruising ground transformed into family-friendly beauty spot, with all the tight control over social behavior that this entails, on a floor scattered with fragments of the electric fencing used to herd cattle. The irony of this unnerving work is hard to avoid: that unruly expressions of individual feeling should not be corralled into patterns more amenable to a supervisory authority is a lesson that might have been heeded.

That might be less of a problem if the end to which the works were being put were clearer. The wall texts that introduce the sections into which the exhibition is divided, each taking a property of sound as metaphor for an organizational principle, present ideas so broad as to defy meaningful application. From the opening chapter, entitled Feedback Effect, for example: “Space, whose division is always geopolitical, is the bond that joins together all emancipatory struggles, from feminism to decolonization to LGBTQIA+ rights.”

The imprecise phrasing—space is not a “bond,” the tacitly agreed boundary between mine and my neighbor’s rooftop clotheslines is not “geopolitical”—is indicative of a convenient vagueness. Do emancipatory struggles exist in space? Yes, as do watering cans and Sophia Loren and Milton Keynes’s many roundabouts. Do we learn anything from this statement beyond that the curators feel the need rhetorically to protest—rather too much—their political commitments because they fear that, left to its own devices, the show itself might not adequately communicate them on their behalf?

In fairness, they have selected many works capable of rising above their enlistment into every cause going. Beaux Mendes’s hypnotizing paintings, notably Jacob’s Ladder (2023), succeed because they work against easy interpretation, whether perceptual—they hover between abstraction and figuration, never allowing the eye to settle—or intellectual. Presented on a freestanding LED wall in front of metal bleachers, Lucy Raven’s Demolition of a Wall (Album 2) (2022) uses military surveillance technology to represent the shockwaves at an explosives range in New Mexico, creating a work so formally uncompromising as to resist incorporation into any overarching “visual symphony.” Similarly, Yuyan Wang’s Green Grey Black Brown (2024) features a montage of images of floods and landslides that—set to a glacial version of Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart” (1983)—work to undermine the conceptual constructs for which metaphors like “feedback effect” and “resonance” are molds.

Collectively, they offer a reminder that works of art also exist in space. Which is to say, they are not abstractions: they have material effects that cannot perfectly be recuperated into linguistic or intellectual frameworks (a plausible working definition for a work of art). The sonic metaphors by which the biennial is arranged—resonance, harmony, polyphony, etc.— work as pleasing intellectual analogues for the organization of a society (dissonance is productive, harmony through the broadcast of diverse voices, and so on). But works of art are like people in that they cannot be so easily subordinated to logically satisfactory patterns of relation. From the same Moore poem, “these things are important not because a / high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are / useful.”

Much the most successful part of the exhibition is that which works against the proposition that works of art conceived independently, in wholly different contexts and in pursuit of diverse artistic programs, can be remixed into a symphonic whole. In the satellite presentations dotted around the district of Yangnim, each artist is allotted their own space and thus freed from the need to participate in the main exhibition’s “opera you can walk into.”5 At Podonamu Art Space, Arutiunian’s own interpretation at one-hundredth speed of a composition for harmonium by the Armenian spiritualist philosopher George Gurdjieff is played through four speakers arrayed around this otherwise empty nook in the neighborhood’s back streets, creating a drone that combined with the patter of rain on the window over the door to build a mesmerizing atmosphere.

The photographs and slides of Lydia Ourahmane’s House of Hope Archives (1989–ongoing) find an ideal home in the basement beneath Jun Hyoungsan’s clanking, glowing sound installation Suspension of disbelief #3 (2018) at Horanggasinamu Art Polygon. The abandoned Old Police House is filled with songs written by artists acquainted with Saâdane Afif and interpreted by a celebrated singer of Pansori (Sora Kim Sings Eternity, 2024), the traditional Korean folk music that originated in shamanistic rituals and which lends its name to Bourriaud’s exhibition. A live performance by Sora Kim of these songs in a packed bar, to the accompaniment of a female percussionist, and an exceptional installation in a dedicated gallery of Togar’s captivating film That is not still (2024) offer further examples of how much more engaging these works are when liberated from the curatorial Gesamtkunstwerk.