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Busan Biennale 2024

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Busan Biennale

The Busan Biennale is a biannual international contemporary art show that integrated three different art events held in the city in 1998: the Busan Youth Biennale, the first biennale of Korea that was voluntarily organized by local artists in 1981; the Sea Art Festival, an environmental art festival launched in 1987 with the sea serving as a backdrop; and the Busan International Outdoor Sculpture Symposium that was first held in 1991. The biennale was previously called the Pusan International Contemporary Art Festival (PICAF) before it launched.

The biennale has its own unique attribute in that it was formed not out of any political logic or need but rather the pure force of local Busan artists’ will and their voluntary participation. Even to this day their interest in Busan's culture and its experimental nature has been the key foundation for shaping the biennale’s identity.

This biennale is the only one like it in the world that was established through an integration of three types of art events such as a Contemporary Art Exhibition, Sculpture Symposium, and Sea Art Festival. The Sculpture Symposium in particular was deemed to be a successful public art event, the results of which were installed throughout the city and dedicated to revitalizing cultural communication with citizens. The networks formed through the event have assumed a crucial role in introducing and expanding domestic art overseas and leading the development of local culture for globalized cultural communication. Founded 38 years ago, the biennale aims to popularize contemporary art and achieve art in everyday life by providing a platform for interchanging experimental contemporary art.

Hong Jin-hwon

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관리자 2024-11-29 10:19

Hong Jin-hwon

Glitch Barricade, 2024, photograph archive, dimension variable. Photograph from Seo Young-geol (Photographic Communication).

Double Slit, 2024, single-channel video, colour, 5.1ch audio 60min.
 
In February 2004, Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) a subcontractor left a suicide note that began, “Subcontractors are human beings too”, and put himself up in flames in the factory. Immediately after the incident, the subcontractors began their protest by occupying HHI’s cranes, but HHI’s regular workers’ union claimed that “He is not a martyr” and invaded his morgue, where they used violence against the subcontractors’ union members and destroyed the memorial space. This incident was the last scene of a class movement under the slogan “Workers Unite”. The chairman of the subcontractors’ union at the time, went into the mountains, and his fellow protesters and singer, went into the marshes where they wrote poetry and nursery rhymes, continuing to fight another battle against irreconcilable capitalism. In their respective places, they retrace the history of revolution and counter-revolution and address issues of land and nature, care, and spirituality. They believe this will be the seed of a new class struggle that prepares the revolution to come. Double Slit (2024) traverses the history of a defeated class struggle with poetry and songs, asking whether there are new possibilities. The two divergent narratives traversing the work function as a double slit, allowing one to sense how two different worlds, the mountain and the marsh, clash and reconcile. Just as waves and particles are inherently one, they stand in solidarity with how perceiving and sensing that the world and I are one can be transformed into the energy of a different revolution.
 
Glitch Barricade (2024) is a solo exhibition of protest photographer Seo Young-geol’s photographs organised by Hong Jin-hwon. Seo is a photographer who documented democracy movements and workers’ struggles in the 1980s and 1990s. He appeared as an interviewee in Hong’s documentary melting icecream (2021), where he testifies to the democratic movement and discusses the limitations of the movement at the time. Hong used Seo’s photographs documenting the 128-day strike at Hyundai Heavy Industries in 1989 in his new film Double Slit (2024) as evidence of how the heroes of the labour movement have become capitalised, bureaucratized, and traitors to the class movement. As such, Seo constantly questions his record and ponders how he can keep alive the memory of a movement that is becoming a thing of the past. In Glitch Barricade, a series of glitchy photographs overlap the ‘heroes’ taken by Seo in the 1980s and 1990s. The photographs, which hint at the situation’s urgency, are chaotically shaky, underexposed, and even double shot. In addition, the urgency of the struggle and the distribution process led to malfunctions in film development and scanning. These errors, useless in the struggle, are interwoven with vague historical scenes, which paradoxically brings the energy of the time to the present. By becoming a psychological barricade that prevents us from easily passing beyond the image into the world of memories and recollections, the work summons the desperate time and space of those who dreamed of a new world. With Seo’s solo exhibition, Hong asks what barricades we need to rebuild now.
 
 
 
 
 
Hong Jin-hwon
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