In the Dark, Every Light is Blinding
Busan Biennale 2025

Commissioned by Global Art Daily
Published on September 19, 2024

* * *

There is no shortness of light for this year's Busan Biennale. Seeing in the Dark could easily be interpreted as new ways of seeing during these dark times, as it metaphorizes "pirate" and Buddhist enlightenment while touching on politicality by resisting transparency from the surveillance-industrial complex.

Curated by Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte, with Suzy Park, this edition features 62 artists and collectives from 36 countries, including Palestine, Iran, Madagascar, Jamaica, Ivory Coast, and Togo. The show is spread across four venues, each boasting its rich history and heritage: Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan Modern & Contemporary History Museum, HANSUNG1918, and Choryang House.

In the opening speech, Busan Mayor Park Heong-joon reminded everyone to "take care" – to tread lightly through the dark, reconsider our ways of navigating exhibitions, and embrace the unfinished. Thus, perhaps, the unapologetic presence of exposed drywalls, scaffoldings, and steel studs throughout the show.

Artists participating in shows and large-scale exhibitions worldwide are experiencing censorship. More often than not, they have resorted to diluting their politics or using abstraction to avert the gaze of power. This may not have been the case for the Busan Biennale, where figuration was the language of criticism.

The curators suggest respect for utopic ideals, "operating beyond the reach of governments and corporations, embracing a multicultural, spiritually tolerant, sexually free, and occasionally purely egalitarian society."

At HANSUNG1918, artist and musician bani haykal’s vocal performance excerpts from anonymous curses (2024) openly criticized the ongoing genocide in Gaza in front of the South Korean media during the biennale’s opening. Nearby, Hong Jin-hwon’s melting icecream (2021), a one-channel video, provides a narrative of fighting another battle against irreconcilable capitalism. This narrative reappears in Glitch Barricade (2024) at Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, an installation that carries the heavy weight of democracy movements and workers' struggles in the 80s and 90s, using photographs from Seo Young-geol.

In the underground of Busan Modern & Contemporary History Museum, the fragmentation of bodies is evident mainly through photographic cropping. At the vault, the first room one encounters displays Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé's Celebrate (1994/2024) and Puncture (1994/2024), a photographic series that pushes the limits of the portrait genre in African studio photography. The series shows fragments of a body through photographic cropping and double exposure.

Beside the front desk, a black curtain stands. Behind it is Zishi Han's new work. The journey to his work requires cautious treading. The room is cold, its atmosphere eerie, and it is dark. The moths (2024) video piece disrupts this dim-lit path, questioning one's ability to see with its intentionally blurred imagery of rapidly moving insects. Two metal sculptures, exuviae (3 a.m.) (2024), hang in a cold corridor, shaking faintly, as if in seizure. Illuminated by a spotlight, these insect-like sculptures appear skinless and motionless, reflecting Han's exploration of power dynamics and masochism.

As one walks out, an upbeat tune reverberates through the vault's halls. It is Lee Yanghee's Hail (2020), a four-channel video in which bodies move from one screen to another in rhythmic choreography. Cropped and fragmented in one frame, the bodies are completed in the next.

So much of the Busan Biennale experience relies on the ability to see, not only with eyes but also with other senses of the body. The entrance of Choryang House invites one to negotiate with its architecture by climbing its stairs, docking one’s head, and walking through tiny corridors.

On the first floor, Kim Jipyeong's Diva-Grandmothers (2023) offers an installation of folded screens where bodies are out of sight yet present through its traces and evocations of grandmothers, soldiers, mourners, shamans, singers, and a community of festivity and joy, free from any fixed identity or hierarchy.

Shooshie Sulaiman and I Wayan Darmadi's works on the second floor are introduced through the cat-like wooden sculptures lining the balcony, looking out onto the landscape of Busan. Working as a collaborative entity named Getah Bening, on PETA - One cloud, nine drops of rain (2024), they carved Southeast Asian Cold War leaders into wild rubber trees and hung them on the house's concrete walls.

Works of a larger scale are reserved for the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art. Korean monk Song Cheon's large-scale, intricate paintings on traditional Korean paper present Buddhist iconography as an attempt at religious illumination. In front of Song Cheon's delicately finished work stands a sculptural arrangement of rusty drones and a room of wreckage, referencing a temporarily wrecked pirate ship: Eugene Jung's WoW (Waves of Wreckage) (2024). A steel staircase at the corner of this work allows the viewer to look down. As I stood above and saw broken MDF, exposed pipes, and cement, I could not help but think this was a ruin in progress and that, at some point, a person in uniform would come and continue ruining what was left. Framing this ruin with an intentionally unfinished exhibition design provides a visual paradox, which echoes throughout the museum, framing other artworks.

On the basement floor of the museum is a long, holed, red paper scroll. It is Yoko Terauchi’s site-specific installation, One is Many, Many is One (2024). At once, it offers a sense of calm and intrigue through its choreographed puncturing. Through its paradoxes about oneness, it suggests connections with the teachings of Buddha.

Some photographic works reflect reality, while others feel like a fever dream, captured in double exposures and slow shutters. Héléne Amouzou's photographic series, the self-portraiture genre is appropriated to locate and register the artist’s state as a migrant in an ever-changing environment.

A program featuring talks, workshops, and performances took place throughout August across the four locations. Uncharted Collective's sound performance, Lull Frequencies, was a highlight. The performance featured a pirate radio broadcast with electromagnetic noise filling the hall and lullabies in various languages, interrupted by distortions and spoken words. With three blinding spotlights illuminating the interactive work of Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Zun Lee, the artist collective moved in the darkness, eventually blending into the crowd. At some point, I could hear two voices talking about the lullabies they knew, but slowly, the listening felt like an intrusion, as if I was not supposed to listen to the voices. The performance ended with a loud radio frequency and a sudden light on.

With the current state of the world, almost nothing is left in the dark. Exhibitions of different scales touch on global politics, where curators and artists show explicit biases. The Busan Biennale, as good as it may be, is a calculated effort to reflect on an already reflected reality.

There is no shortage of light here. Everything is already illuminated, and our eyes have adjusted during these dark times. Outside Busan, beyond the Biennale, seeing fragmented bodies in the dark is not just a metaphor.✶