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.
Subversive Film
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BB2024 2024-12-02 09:56
An Exercise in Assembling, 2023-present, single-channel video, sound, 1hr. 7min.
Subversive Film present their film-project An Exercise in Assembling (2023-present), which is an ongoing form of cinematic archaeology and preservation of sequences of ‘cinéma de combat’ at the heart of various liberation struggles, revolutions, and emancipatory movements, workers and immigrant movements. The project involves the contributions of numerous researchers, filmmakers, technicians, activists, archivists, a network that solicits and investigates various archival niches, sourcing often fragile reels from an array of militant and politically made cinema. Through assembly in a new montage, scenes and fragments are preserved, pieced together and rearranged under the sections: assembly as film; assembly as liberation; assembly as power; and assembly as method. Screened without sound the fragments in An Exercise in Assembling are subtitled and captioned with information about the specific manifestations or events and the location where the material was found. They open up a world of different cinematic geographies in Palestine, Cuba, Algiers, Western Sahara, Guinea Bissau, Vietnam, France with potential to extend beyond. An Exercise in Assembling focuses on bodies that gather, come together, or assemble to generate a presence, movement in a space—both actual and cinematic—against colonial, capitalist, class, or gender violence. They not only allow a contemporary distribution but also a reflective reactivation of their original agency. We find patterns in how cinema represented assemblies, or how cinema employed shots of gatherings, both mass and more intimate, to construct the space of a struggle.
Subversive Film
