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.
2018 THE SHAKE
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관리자 2018-08-21 10:49
THE SHAKE - Memory Scaffolding, Digital print, 107 x 5744 cm, 2013 – 2018
THE SHAKE - Materialised Distance, Ceramic, 23 x 17 x 15 cm, 2013 - 2018, All courtesy of the artist
Khaled BARAKEH
THE SHAKE - Memory Scaffolding
THE SHAKE - Materialised Distance
The group of works that Barakeh is showing in the Busan Biennale, however, elaborate on sculptor Maurice Harron’s public monument The SHAKE—Re-conciliation/Hands Across the Divide (1991). Erected in Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland—the part of the island of Ireland that belongs to the United Kingdom—Harron’s sculpture comprises two bronze men, who reach towards one another, their hands stopping just shy of contact. The remaining gap reminds of the persistent failure of opposing political groups—Irish, catholic nationalists on the one hand, and protestant unionists loyal to London on the other—to achieve an understanding. In The SHAKE–Materialised Distance (2013–18), this gap between the bronze figures’s hands—the charged negative space between them—is rendered as a haunting white-cast shape, floating ominously above its plinth. Barakeh’s The SHAKE-Memory Scaffolding(2013–18) comprises large photographic prints—made of the many 3D scans of Hands Across the Divide that Barakeh captured in order to execute his project—that are placed vertically onto the floor like undulating, distorted echoes of the original monument.