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 event 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. Trajal Harrell punctuates the program with his take on butoh as “the dead dancing through the living” to navigate various theoretical, physical, sonic, and spiritual vocabularies in forms of communality. 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.
DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY
Davide Quadrio
PRODUCED BY
Jinyoung Shin (apparat/US) x Swan Studio x StudioPEBS
PERFORMERS
∞OS (Dmitry Paranyushkin and Koo Des): 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) | Sissel Tolaas: Wristband designed by Sruli Recht
Commissioned by the 13th Gwangju Biennale and Arthub, with the support of Alcantara
Wristband produced with the support of Ecco.
A special thank you to the Embassy of Italy in Korea and the Italian Cultural Institute for their support.
The Procession: Through the Gates was done during our installation time in February in collaboration with ∞OS (Dmitry Paranyushkin and Koo Des), Katarina Barruk, Cecilia Bengolea, Sangdon Kim, Angelo Plessas, JeongKwan Sunim, Sissel Tolaas, and Siyabonga Mthembu. Works on view by: Pacita Abad, Yin-Ju Chen & Li-Chun Lin (Marina), Hyun-taek Cho, Emo de Medeiros, Patricia Domínguez, John Gerrard, Femke Herregraven, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tishan Hsu, Gözde Ilkin, Sylbee Kim, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Gap-chul Lee, Liliane Lijn, Candice Lin, Vivian Lynn, Ana María Millán, Min Joung-Ki, Kyungwon Moon, Fernando Palma Rodríguez, People’s Archive of Rural India – PARI, Outi Pieski, Arpita Singh, Tcheu Siong, Cecilia Vicuña, and Ouattara Watts; loans from the collection of the Gahoe Minhwa Museum, Seoul and of the Museum of Shamanism, Seoul.