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 Stasi City
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관리자 2018-08-21 11:58
Stasi City, 4 screen video installation, 4min 56sec, 1997, Courtesy of Jane and Louise Wilson and 303 Gallery, New York
Jane and Louise WILSON
Stasi City
The central concern of the Wilson’s contribution to the Busan Biennale is the sinister collaboration between surveillance and state power; a recurrent theme for the pair, recently explored in their 2011 series of augmented self-portraits, False Positives, False Negatives. Here, viewers see the 1997 installation Stasi City. A four channel video installed via projections in the gallery space, this work comprises footage shot by the artists in the former wire-tapping facility of the Stasi, who were the notorious secret police force within the former German Democratic Republic. The popular memory of life under Stasi observation, is one of widespread suspicion—the organizations surveillance apparatus’s were sweeping, and included virulent informant networks—and a resultant sense of social disorientation. Thus, the work is not just about a historical episode but about a principle of power and manipulation that is reflected in many dystopian scenarios. In the meandering and fragmentary character of its footage, Stasi City echoes this embodied consequence of totalitarian rule, albeit through resolutely non-sensational images of its literal, banal interior.