Nicolas Bourriaud Discusses the Curatorial Approach of the 2024 Gwangju Biennale

Following Venice, South Korea’s Gwangju Biennale was one of the first to be established and still holds its place as one of the most significant in the region. Its origins are tied to the Democratic Uprising of 1980, a critical moment in the nation’s transition to democracy after a period of dictatorship. This political backdrop gives the Biennale a unique position, more so than many others, as a platform deeply rooted in political discourse, offering a space for critical dialogue on both global and local issues.

The 15th edition, titled “PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century,” opened in preview last week and focuses on sound as both a symbolic metaphor and a tool for exploring the polyphony of voices that define our century’s cultural, political and historical dynamics. Designed to be an immersive experience, the Gwangju Biennale functions as a space for contemplation, exchange and dialogue, as well as a walkable opera. In this context, landscapes are also soundscapes, and the notion of chorus invites an embrace of multiperspective, multicultural realities, fostering balance and harmony between humans and other living beings.

Park Yang-woo, president of the biennale’s governing body and former minister of culture, feels strongly that biennales worldwide need to experiment and challenge existing horizons in contemporary art. “A biennale that does not introduce new discourse on contemporary art has fallen short of its potential,” he told Observer, adding that he expects the fifteenth edition of the Gwangju Biennale will offer “new perspectives in the history of biennales and within the broader context of global art and culture.”

Observer also caught up with renowned French art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud, artistic director of the 2024 Gwangju Biennale, in advance of the preview week to discuss some of the main themes and the curatorial approach that shaped “PANSORI.”

The concept of landscape as a “soundscape” is fascinating, highlighting how ecosystems naturally blend sounds like a chorus but are often disrupted by human noise. How will this idea come to life in the exhibition space? Also, with the show described as an “opera you can walk into,” how will the different voices interact within it?

A few days before the opening, I am quite impatient to finalize the sonic aspect of the biennale. I am expecting sounds to overlap and respond to each other on every floor of the exhibition. Normally, in most collective exhibitions, boxes are built and made soundproof to give each artist a private zone and a kind of autonomy. At the same time, in every group show, artworks are supposed to be displayed in a meaningful way and visually match. Here, I decided to process the sound the same way: there will be echoes, overlaps and chords created at a sonic level. The landscape will really be a soundscape, and that is part of the “operatic” value of the exhibition. When the visitor approaches a painting, it will not only be a painting but a silence in a score.

Curated by Sophia Park, Kuralai Abdukhalikova and Barbara Lagié under your artistic direction, the show is divided into three sections, each tied to a sonic phenomenon: “The Larsen Effect,” focusing on the oversaturation and density of urban and non-human spaces; “Polyphony,” reflecting our multi-layered universe; and “The Primordial Sound,” reconnecting with the cosmos. How have these sections been designed within the space, and can you share examples of the works featured in each?

Space and sound are both vibrations. The feedback effect, or Larsen effect, is the same thing. It is a sonic phenomenon that appears whenever two emitters are too close to each other—in other words, it is created by a lack of space or intense proximity. The first floor is very urban, even claustrophobic, built as a kind of maze. Visitors enter the exhibitions through a very long dark tunnel where a sound piece by Emeka Ogboh will bring the streets of Lagos and its markets. It’s a deep, very dense soundscape. The first floor corresponds to this impression of saturation. The second floor gathers artists who address the question of the industrialization of nature; it shows the countryside as an extension of the factory, becoming automated.

The third floor is about polyphony: how artists integrate other living forms into their practice, animal, vegetal and even machinic forms. The last two floors are devoted to the primordial sound, which is “ôm” in the Hindu tradition. The primordial sound is two-fold: one, the immensity of the cosmos, and two, the infinitely small. I see that many artists are exploring either the minuscule or the gigantic—and many are interested in shamanism, which is an inter-reign exploration, a spiritual technique to explore other worlds. To sum it up, the exhibition starts with saturation and ends with the infinite. The further in you go, the more the space will open. The last floor, the fifth one, will be devoted to the infinitely small.

The idea of chorus and polyphony highlights the vital interconnection between entities, biological cycles, and functions. While we are all part of the same biosystem, science has traditionally placed humans at the top of a hierarchical order. In your curatorial statement, you describe “PANSORI” as “an operatic exhibition about the space we inhabit, from our housing to human occupation of the planet.” How do the works on view encourage a shift in this perspective?  I feel that some of these themes were also already anticipated in your book, Inclusions: Aesthetics of the Capitalocene, which challenges the nature-culture divide and advocates for a new “Simbiocene.”

“PANSORI” is part of a cycle of exhibitions about the Anthropocene that I started ten years ago. The main question is, how is climate change producing a change also in the artists’ minds? How does it modify their representations, their practice, and their way of thinking? “The Great Acceleration,” a show I curated in Taipei in 2014, was the first biennial addressing the notion of the Anthropocene. Five years later, in Istanbul, I centered the exhibition upon the garbage patches in the oceans, waste and floating plastic. In Venice, in 2022, “Planet B” made a parallel between the romantic notion of the “sublime” and the feeling of loss of control, toxic immersion and being threatened by the atmosphere. Every time, I develop a new angle on the same phenomenon, which is climate change. Curating is also a kind of ping-pong with my books; my writings feed my exhibitions and vice versa. For Gwangju, I wanted to continue questioning climate change through the most banal theme, which is the notion of “space.” Everyone has something to say about it, from the taxi driver to the quantum physician.

Recently, more artists have been exploring interspecies relationships to imagine new forms of hybridization, harmony, and collaboration between humans, nonhumans, organic life, and technology. How is this theme represented in this Biennale?

Symbiosis may also be the key to an inclusive space, socially speaking. In art, it may be called a relational space, which could be, for instance, a space that can only be depicted through relations with non-human elements, inter-species relations. A shared space. Artists cannot go on representing the world as an “environment,” as a stage where only human beings have agency. In a way, I see artworks as having an agency, being able to enter into a dialogue with other living spheres. The figure of the shaman, which is widely spread out now and used by artists, symbolizes this capacity to travel into other worlds: art is human diplomacy, a diplomatic effort toward other forms of life. In the exhibition, Max Hooper Schneider, Bianca Bondi or Marguerite Humeau, for example, compose ecosystems, and their way of composing a space is ecosystemic because they create a space by feeding it, adding elements that interact with each other.

This Biennial is a “soundscape of the 21st century,” a time marked by major technological advancements that have transformed the sounds around us, alongside political events that have added to the global “noise.” Given the political origins of the Gwangju Biennale and the fact that this edition marks its 30th anniversary, how does it engage with its history while reflecting on the complex dynamics of the 21st Century?

This instability can be felt in the exhibition in the overlapping of sounds and visual rhymes that are on every floor. Politics is also formal; it is a combination of formats and space-times assembled in a certain way. Democracy is a specific montage: it generates a family of forms that are more open, more dialogical and more inclusive than in authoritarian regimes. I always saw art as an alternative editing table for reality. We are proposed life scenarios by the society we live in, and artists recompose and re-edit them. It is the big formal difference between democracy and dictatorship. It is important to understand that politics starts with representation. There are formal struggles everywhere in the world.

The title “PANSORI,” drawn from a traditional Korean musical genre, symbolizes the deep connection between sound and space. Recently, more contemporary artists have turned to Indigenous knowledge, ancestral wisdom and ancient traditions to explore alternative paradigms and a deeper, more profound connection with nature and humanity, which has been lost in our human-centered civilization. How will this Biennale address these themes?

This ancestral wisdom, which finds its most important visual translation today with the rise of eco-feminist ways of thinking is, first of all, part of a global strategy against the standardization of the world and its transformation into an automatic platform. The more natural resources are exhausted, the more human beings turn into data, into “human resources.” The relational space that a new generation of artists is dealing with goes against automation.

The question is, do we want a world that is dominated by algorithms or a living world that is composed of different subjects we can interact with? We are in the middle of a crisis of the human scale. Whether they are industrially produced or considered “natural,” things reflect human reality, sometimes even more so than humans themselves, since humans have trouble existing outside the networks or events they are caught up in or, since they have been reduced to an exchangeable workforce subordinated to a machine or an IT platform, to consumers controlled by algorithms. Shamanism and animism are ideas that can be used within strategies of re-subjectivization of the world.

You were the first to theorize the concept of “relational aesthetics.” Through your curatorial work, you’ve extensively explored the relationship between art, technology and media, examining various forms of networks. How do you think this idea of relational aesthetics has evolved over the past decade, especially in light of themes like interspecies relationships, shamanism and environmental awareness?

Relational aesthetics has evolved toward more inclusivity. This means that in my eyes, it now includes the non-human, our relations with the animals, the vegetal, the invisible agents like viruses or degrees of temperature, the machines, etc. What I call the “relational space” is a space of interactions: there are no objects anymore, but agents at different degrees of subjectivity. Today’s artists are much more aware of it, and there has been a huge anti-anthropocentric movement in the last two decades. In the 1990s, the rise of the internet and the beginnings of an industry based on human relations, or services, were the main issues. Nowadays, it is the relationships between humans and what they used to consider as an “environment.” The world is an echo chamber.

“PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century” runs through December 1 in Gwangju, South Korea.