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 A Village by the Sea
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관리자 2013-03-25 09:43
A VILLAGE BY THE SEA
“A Village by the Sea” (2011) is a 35mm black and white film produced by Mathias Poledna to evoke a scene or excerpt from a late 1930s, early 1940s musical. The film was shot on a sound stage in Los Angeles, in a period-style set that was designed and furnished to convey the interior of an elegant apartment or hotel suite. It features a musical number based on a period song by French composer and singer Charles Trenet, which was re-written and arranged as a duet in the style of the American Songbook tradition. The instrumentation of the original song, a chanson, was significantly expanded in scope as well as in type, so that it now includes woodwinds, brass and harp to achieve the lush sound associated with this period. The track was recorded with a 30-piece ensemble of session musicians at the Eastwood Scoring Stage at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, California, one of the few remaining recording stages from this peak era of the studio system.Choreographed along a series of tightly coordinated classic tracking and master shots, “A Village by the Sea” features two characters – a female and a male – with an ambiguous, possibly romantically tinged past. With the themes of reminiscence, nostalgia and love lost reverberating both in the lyrics and in the performers’ guarded interactions, they inhabit a world of extreme artifice, melancholia and sentimentality that is only occasionally punctuated by comical ambiguity.While “A Village by the Sea” is specifically motivated by Poledna’s interest in the period of the Great Depression and the early years of WWII, it is also indebted to other moments of popular culture, in particular concepts formulated around the notion of “new” or ”intelligent pop” in Great Britain and the reception of “Golden Era” American studio productions in France during the 1960s.
Text: Galerie Buchholz, Köln