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.
Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé
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BB2024 2024-11-29 17:09
Celebrate series, 1994/2024, analogue C-print, 63.5x63.5cm (8).
Puncture series, 1994/2024, analogue C-print, 63.5x63.5cm (4).
Toga Party series, 1994/2024, analogue C-print, 63.5x63.5cm (4).
Toga Party series, 1994/2024, giclee print, 63.5x63.5cm (2).
Oladélé Bamgboyé’s series of photographs Celebrate (1997/2024) and Puncture (1997/2024) pushes the limits of the genre of the portrait in African studio photography. With the studio as a site for self-fashioning and staged, imaginative, self-expression of the sitter, Bamgboyé becomes sitter and photographer in one, while dancing through what seems to be a luminous white cube adorned with wrinkled ribbons. All the while sometimes comfortably nude Bamgboyé adds to the illegibility of the space he acts in, by using multiple and shifting exposures, deceitfully offering an indeterminate and manifold image of his identity, warding off usual projections onto the ‘black male body.’
Frolicking around amongst friends in a photo studio with cheap props; togas, laurel crowns and cardboard paper cut-outs that suggest antique architecture, sculpture and minotaur-headed vases, in the series Toga Party (1997/2024) Bamgboyé further problematises essentialist notions of identity. Deftly connecting his scenes with a hilarious take on the ‘pathos formula’, the passionate gesture language coined by art historian Aby Warburg in his research on the afterlife of antiquity in the arts, Bamgboyé’s appropriation of the origin of European civilisation is held in derision as just party antics. One of the scenes features an incisive critique on the visual history of that ‘civilisation’ with Bamgboyé slipping into the character of the servant carrying a parasol to protect his white friends from the sunlight.
