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.
《어둠에서 보기》Seeing in the Dark
What might it mean to see in the dark? It is this predicament we find ourselves in, as navigating ground that is at once known and unknowable, a place that is terrifying, yet, our imperative is to imagine a beyond like never before. We are kept in the dark from the reality of our political moment, with the mechanics of the world constantly positioned as out of sight. Conventionally, the European Enlightenment is thought of in relation to ‘light’ and the belief that knowledge appears only with visibility. Instead of admonishing darkness, we see these depths as presenting an embracing alternative.
The 2024 edition of the Busan Biennale, called Seeing in the Dark is imagined in the mental space between notions of 'Pirate Enlightenment’ on the one hand and ‘Buddhist Enlightenment’ on the other. We consider these spaces as offering an alternative to the demands for transparency by the surveillance-industrial complex. We liken artistic activity to the fugitive strategy of deception as a way to invoke what theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call ‘fugitive enlightenment’. We see tactics of operating surreptitiously as part of ‘another tradition of cultural experiment, and of perversion’.
We draw upon the idea of the ‘pirate utopias’ as early forms of autonomous societies, operating beyond the reach of governments and corporations, embracing a multicultural, spiritually tolerant, sexually free, and occasionally purely egalitarian society. Decisions were made by negotiation and assembly in a council which consisted of the ablest pirates without distinction of culture or colour. According to anthropologist David Graeber (a key figure in our thinking), these experiments served as the template for the best aspects of the Enlightenment movement in Europe.
The Buddhist monastic way, is positioned as a compliment to these ideas, centred on humility in a community departing from secular life. Through regular gatherings decisions regarding monastic rules and the dispositions of communal property were made. The figure of the Buddha, ‘always already an empty signifier’, an ‘identity evacuated of identity’, as a homeless, a diasporic, or a wandering and advanced globalised condition, points to a ‘self without place’: a self we interpret as akin to the migrant, the refugee, the proletarian rebel, the drop-out, or the pirate.
The title of the biennale, Seeing in the Dark, makes the potential of enlightenment active and contingent, an agency in the here and now. Darkness is a component of both pirate enlightenment (many pirates were kept in dark histories, as well as had to operate out of sight of the state) as well as Buddhist enlightenment in finding a path towards the end of suffering. Both traditions have rich visual histories, many of which playfully engage with ideas of narrative.
Seeing in the Dark is a visual paradox. It can refer to the metaphorical darkness many people are forced to function in, threatened by the technological appropriation of the wonderful gift of night-vision from the animal world for purposes of surveillance. Darkness is a space of emancipation and awakens a degree of ‘primal’ awareness. Instead of consumers in control, we have to mobilise other senses next to vision and the regimes of the visible in order to orientate.
Both the Pirate utopias and the (Buddhist) monastery indicate spaces of or aimed at liberation, spaces of consciousness, from which a reimagination of the world may proceed. In this respect, we consider the pirate ship and the Buddhist monastery as two symbolic images which buttress our conceptual framework for the Busan Biennale 2024. We consider this reimagination crucial in the gloomy times we live in, and one which will guide our social and aesthetic approach to the Busan Biennale. The conversations between both points of influence, pirate enlightenment and Buddhist enlightenment, don’t necessarily aim at a consensus, but at engagements which show that ideologies can be divergent, even irreconcilable, but without demanding violent negation, create a form of ‘critical festivity’.