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.
2012 The Odessa Stairs
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관리자 2013-03-25 09:40
THE ODESSA STAIRS
Inspired by a TV report on the luxury renovation of a former Korean president’s villa, Kyungah Ham made a field trip to the site and rummaged through the garbage. She collected the leftovers – including golf shoes, a carpet, an office chair, a Japanese bidet, a bamboo tree, pipes, tiles and other construction materials – and built a device consisting chiefly of plywood and other cheap materials to house and display her collection.Though it resembles a makeshift structure, “Odessa Stairs” is a monumental piece, a free-standing staircase worthy of its glorious title and reference. After all, the Odessa stairs are the site of one of the most legendary scenes in film history. In Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” (1925), we see the massacre of Odessa’s ordinary citizens, including elderly people, women and children, at the hands of Tsarist troops.
Eisenstein’s film – a propaganda movie if there ever was one – dramatizes the mutiny of revolutionary-minded sailors on a Russian battleship in 1905. The people, all enthusiastically supportive to the sailors’ cause, are seen filling the steps like a grandstand. In a tricky montage, the film viewer is then made to witness the cruel transformation of a cheerful crowd into a bloody pile of corpses, murdered by a phalanx of Tsarist soldiers slowly marching down the steps and leveling their guns at every resting place. One famous sequence follows the bumpy passage of a baby carriage down the steps after a dying mother let go of the handle. Resting at the foot of “Odessa Stairs”, analogous to that baby carriage, is a Carrefour shopping cart loaded with construction materials. (Carrefour – one of the largest retailers in the world – entered South Korea in 1996. Like Wal-Mart, it floundered and left in 2006 after failing to localize its operation.)
Clearly, Ham’s precarious monument asks us to draw parallels between modern Korean history and Eisenstein’s mythic scene. This is not altogether difficult, as Korean history is also marked by the massacre following the Gwangju Uprising in 1980, which of course the former president (the same president from whose garbage heap the items were taken) had a hand in. Reading “Odessa Stairs” in this way would turn Ham’s installation into a fine memorial. A memorial that is not, as it happens all too often, drowned in its own rhetoric, but is heartfelt and formally accomplished at the same time.