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.
2014 Untitled
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관리자 2014-09-16 10:33
2005
Oil and wax on canvas
21 panels 220×160cm each
Courtesy of Ben Brown Fine Arts, London
Untitled
After the late 1980s, Tatah started drawing giant statues of people lying, falling bodies, walking persons, workers, and the unemployed. The attitude and presence of figures correspond to the political attitude in Tatah¡¯s empty space is at the point of abstraction. Based on the framework of previous movement and its routes, Tatah¡¯s figures become the variation that hides decorative dimension. Before, the figures were developed within the sequential rhythm that was close to photography or rather a video. Each painting was a sequence and an implementation of innocence that is like an appearing and disappearing ghost leading us to collective and universal memory from the private memory of a silent body. Djamel Tatah¡¯s shadow-less painting is a kind of threshold and space to think about immigration, solitude, and destruction of memory, a doorstep of transformation of time.