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.
2022 Nina Beier + Bob Kil
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관리자 2022-12-16 14:31
Shelf Life, 2022, Performance, bathtubs, sand, 775×435cm.
Date: Sep. 11 (Sun), Sep. 12 (Mon) Regularly
Performer: Bob Kil, Mina Kang, YeonJeong Lee, Ara Lee, Jeong Bin Seo, Gi Won Seo, Jeongim Lee
In Nina Beier and Bob Kil’s new collaboration, household objects, raw materials and performers have been combined to similar virtual effect. A collection of bathtubs are embedded in the ground. They are filled with slightly different types of sand extracted from industries spanning construction, tech, fine art and wellness. At irregular intervals performers insert themselves into the casketesque tubs becoming immobilised by the weight of the sand. In disengaged synchronicity, their gazes move, they blink once bringing a sense of relief or cognitive break, and the minimal choreography is repeated in a relentless GIF-like loop. A span of attention. Whereas animations make digital images feel more alive, here the movements of the performers imitate the constrained way media operates. The eyes stutter or jitter like digital video when panning.
As if a marble sculpture has been turned to dust, the sand becomes a solid sculptural depiction of water. Rituals of collective bathing are called up but sit incongruously in relation to the household bathtub – an object which signalled increasing value placed on private, domestic spaces, and having alone time became a commodity itself. This sculpture frames the performers, caught between immobility and action, intensity, and emptiness. When devoid of any spectacle, the bathtubs become a negative portrait of the absent bodies. The traces of the performers remain faintly in the sand.
Nina Beier + Bob Kil
b. 1975 in Aarhus, Denmark (Nina Beier) / b. 1975 in Seoul, South Korea (Bob Kil)
Lives in Copenhagen, Denmark (Nina Beier) / Live in Berlin, Germany (Bob Kil)
Alongside their individual practices, Nina Beier and Bob Kil occasionally fuse their sculptures and performances together in scenarios oscillating between the static and the organic. Digging into cultural codes of both objects and behaviours, Beier and Kil’s works explore familiar tropes and unfold the implicit economical and interpersonal power structures they represent. Sculptural elements act as hosts or frames for performers in a symbiosis where the immobile and animated merge into one. Nina Beier and Bob Kil previously presented collaborative works at various institutions such as Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, 2022), Thorvaldsen Museum (Copenhagen, 2021), Pogo Bar, KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin, 2019).