Through the Gates, the Activation of Gwangju Biennale, Minds Rising and Spirits Tuning.
Through the Gates, the Activation of Gwangju Biennale, Minds Rising and Spirits Tuning.
Davide Quadrio
During the opening, the Biennale Hall hosts an adaptive program of initiations that tests the boundaries of resilience and resistance. Composed of live commissions and exhibited works, this organic procession inverts notions of the living and the dead, the live and the inanimate, “awakening” the works on view and rendering the exhibition a ceremonial ground where the communal mind plays a revitalizing role.
Continuing their engagement with swarm intelligence, confluence dynamics, and the collective cyborg body, ∞OS (Dmitry Paranyushkin and Koo Des) has choreographed and scored the procession with a machine logic and live soundscape based on the audience’s physical movements. ∞OS has spatialized the choreography in collaboration with Biennale artists Angelo Plessas and Sangdon Kim to allow the procession body to morph between flow and rupture as environments of sound, movement, and elective affinities create kinetic vortexes across the exhibition’s five galleries. Honorable Buddhist monk Jeong Kwan initiates the exhibition with a sutra reading. Corporeal intelligence holds sway in the drumming of shaman Lin Li-Chun (Marina) and artist Yin-Ju Chen’s meditative journeys that summon altered states of consciousness. Angelo Plessas adds props and costumes that conjure talismans for the present, inviting repose, collectivity, and mental cleansing and renewal while also playfully adapting rituals of cyber shamanism in which networked intelligence braids with the body and the machine. A remote performance by Sámi singer Katarina Barruk animates the voices and wisdoms of her grandmothers and ancestors in a composition of Ume Sámi lyrics, vocals, and joik. Siyabonga Mthembu echoes, “We fetch songs from places, or songs fetch us from places,” and his work A Prayer for Healing draws upon South African jazz and Korean percussion techniques to release incantations that distill dissonance as a mode of living, mourning, and surmounting the discordances and clamors of the present. Cecilia Bengolea continuously mobilizes and re-sculpts the bodily spectrum of tai chi, Taekkyeon, kung fu, and other practices inspired by Asian energy systems in workshops imagined in collaboration with children studying martial arts who lead the audience in respiratory exercises. Exploring memory-keeping and equity through olfactory means, Sissel Tolaas has infused ecological leather armbands designed by Sruli Recht with a molecule prepared at her laboratory in Berlin to remind us that memory never belongs solely to the past but can be brought into the present through sensory intelligence. Virtual prosthetics drafted by Zeitguised probe the thresholds and potentialities of spectral forces and shadowy presences within the exhibition, as metabolic states of mind and matter converge and resound as Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning reveals its coda, an end that is also a resolution.
The procession: through the Gates – “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning”
Commissioned by the 13th Gwangju Biennale and Arthub, in collaboration with Alcantara
Produced by apparat/US
Artistic Directors: Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala
Directed and produced by Davide Quadrio
Associate producer: Jinyoung Shin+Kathy Kyunghoo Lee
Choreography & Soundscape: 8os (Dmitry Paranyushkin and Koo Des)
Associate Curators: Michelangelo Corsaro and Joowon Park
Production Assistant: Jiin Lim
Original works: Yin-Ju Chen, Trajal Harrell, Sangdon Kim, Siyabonga Mthembu, Kate Crawford & Matteo Pasquinelli, Angelo Plessas, Sissel Tolaas, Cecilia Bengolea.
Musical interventions: Katarina Barruk, Siyabonga Mthembu, 8os (Dmitry Paranyushkin and Koo Des)
Initiation ceremony: Esteemed nun Jeong Kwan
Performers:
[8os] Lyon eun Kwon, Yeji Yi, Yunju Lee, Jonghyeon Lee, Ji Hye Chung, Seungmin Choi
[Siyabonga Mthembu] Samulnori HANMAC (Kyeonghoon Kim, Minsoo Kim, Minwoo Kim, Pyeongsup Kim, Jinwoo Park, Daegeun Cho)
[Cecilia Bengolea] Janghun Ryu, Jihun Ryu, Eungyul Jo, Daegyeom Ahn, Yulgyeom Ahn, Jaegyu Lim, Jaewhi Cho, Eunchan Chun, Suyeon Han, Taekyung Han
*Taekkyeon Advisor: Jeongseok Ahn
Cinematography: Swan Park
Camera Assistant: ML, Dongwoo Lee, Donggyu Lee
Virtual Prosthetics: Zeitguised
Stage Manager: Woosup Sim
Stage Crew: Sunwoo Kim
Sound Director: Taesoon Jang
Sound Crew: Saerom Jung
Costume Designer: Hojin Jeong (PAUS artisanal)
Technical Translator: Yeri Soh
Rehearsal Translator: Min-hyung Kang
Project manager: Minsung Lee
Intern: Junghyun Park, Sehyun Kim, Jiwon Choi, Hyejin Song
Wristband designed by Sruli Recht and produced with the support of Ecco.
A special thank you to the Embassy of Italy in Korea and the Italian Cultural Institute and PLASTIC PRODUCT for their support.