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.
Bianca BONDI
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관리자 2020-09-05 12:01
Born 1986 in Johannesburg, South Africa
Lives in Paris, France
Bianca BONDI, The Antechamber, 2020, Mixed media, variable dimensions
BONDI’s new installation for Busan Biennal 2020, The Antechamber, is a translation of KIM Hyesoon’s poem, Tundra Swan. As Bondi states: “salt is essential for life but too much brings death.” Taking inspiration from paintings such as Henri Gervex’s Rolla (1878) or John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851-1852), we observe a clinical but feminine bedroom setting composed of a bed with a pond in it, echoing a circular mirror above a dresser at the end of a pathway through the tundra. All is covered with salt except the pond and the mirror. We are then invited to cross over an open-air cosmic digestive space where salt represents preservation but also resurrection. A swan stands alone. It symbolizes the force of art and poetry, capable of singing even better before its death. We are living in a system that leads us to death and we are all survivors in resistance like the phoenix rising from our ashes. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed. The salt can dissolve in water and later recrystallize and oxidize around itself.