Upcoming Gwangju Biennale to focus on space, inspired by 'pansori'

Next year’s Gwangju Biennale will focus on the theme of space in sociopolitical and environmental contexts in the “operatic” format inspired by traditional Korean musical storytelling performance pansori, its artistic director Nicolas Bourriaud...

Nicolas Bourriaud, artistic director of the 15th edition of Gwangju Biennale, which will open next year, explains the theme of the edition in Seoul on Monday. [YONHAP]

Next year’s Gwangju Biennale will focus on the theme of space in sociopolitical and environmental contexts in the “operatic” format inspired by traditional Korean musical storytelling performance pansori, its artistic director Nicolas Bourriaud said in Seoul on Monday.

Bourriaud, a renowned critic and curator famous for his publications “Relational Aesthetics” (1998) and “Postproduction”(2001), was appointed last month as the director of the 15th Gwangju Biennale that will take place in September, 2024. He announced the 15th edition will have the theme “Pansori — a soundscape of the 21st century” in a press meeting in a restaurant in Seoul.

“I got interested in pansori as I learned that pan means a public place and sori means not only music but sound and, further, sound of common people,” Bourriaud said. Pansori is a musical storytelling performance by a singer and a drummer. It originated in southwest Korea in the 17th century to accompany shamanistic rituals.

“Space is a broad topic that encompasses many 21st-century issues; it is intertwined with issues from the global to the most intimate,” he continued. “In a global context, spatial issues are related to climate change. As sea levels rise, the land we live on may shrink. More intimate spatial issues relate to social space. In her essay ‘A Room of One's Own,’ Virginia Woolf seriously raised the issue of feminism through the issue of space. Where is my place in this society is a question of space. The immigration issue is also related to space.”

He added, “The recent pandemic also deeply transformed our perception of and relation to space.”

According to the artistic director, the biennale will have three sections, each corresponding to a sonic phenomenon. Visitors will follow a simple narrative — from the human density of urban space to the non-human worlds, either microscopic or cosmic.

To explain the first section, Bourriaud played a noise to the press and explained that this was the "Larsen effect,” also known as audio feedback, which occurs when two sound emitters or receivers are too close one to another. “The sound is produced by crowding, by lack of space,” he said.

The first section of "Pansori — a soundscape of the 21st century" will have the theme "Larsen effect,” and will deal with a world saturated with human activities, where both interhuman and interspecies relations become more intense and bring about conflicts, he said.

The second section’s theme is “Polyphony.” The director said the section will focus on complexity, acknowledging that we live in a multi-focused and multi-layered universe.

He then played the Buddhist Om to the press and explained it is an example of “the primordial sound” which is the theme of the third section. “In the third section, artists will explore the non-human world, the ‘two immensities’ that are in front of us: the cosmos and the molecular world,” he said.

In a word, the theme of "Pansori — a soundscape of the 21st century” is space and its format is sound, Bourriaud said. “I have a very ambitious idea for this biennial format,” he added. “I want to organize the artworks like a sequence so that the viewer can experience it like a movie. I want there to be a story.”

The ongoing 14th edition of the Gwangju Biennale, with the theme “Soft and Weak like Water” will wrap up on July 9.

BY MOON SO-YOUNG [moon.soyoung@joongang.co.kr]