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 Conditioning
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관리자 2018-08-21 11:52
The Conditioning, Paper on wooden wall, Dimensions variable, 2018, Courtesy of the artist
Gabriel LESTER and Jonas LUND
The Conditioning
Titled The Conditioning (2018), Lester’s site-specific installation for the Busan Biennale pursues a more sober but no less immersive critique of architectural space, and politics. This effort began with works like Cross Section(2006), Big Bang (2007), and Big Bang Pang (2013). In those pieces, viewers passed through multiple false walls inside the gallery, each excised with geometrically and organically shaped hollows, which drew attention around our often forgotten experience of space. With The Conditioning, Lester gives this method a political and softly institutional-critical function. Many false walls have been clustered near the entrances to the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art’s basement exhibition spaces—architecturally compressed obstacles through which viewers have to walk, back and forth. Each wall is covered in propagandist imagery, from Korea and across the world—yet the compressed space doesn’t allow for any panoramic viewpoint onto these images, leaving the viewer with haunting fragmentary glimpses of the Cold War era as they enter the exhibition space. Lester and artist Jonas Lund, in collaboration, are creating the web project Run Oxymoron (2018) which on the Biennale’s social media and website, creates a state of flux, of a shifting ongoing narrative, as a kind of play that performs different positions, to reflect on the current geo-political state of divisions, of binary oppositions in terms of territory and world-views, ideas and ideologies.