Mike Nelson, 〈Imperfect geometry for a concrete quarry〉, 2016.

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12th Gwangju Biennale’s theme of Imagined Borders, the Gwangju Biennale Foundation(President, Kim Sun Jung) launches ‘The GB Commission’ which seeks to explore the history of the city of Gwangju and the origin of the Gwangju Biennale, founded to sublimate the scars of the Gwangju Democratization Movement in 1980 into culture and arts. Four participating artists, Adrián Villar Rojas, Mike Nelson,Kader Attia and Apichatpong Weerasethakul have been commissioned to develop new site specific works, exploring the historic sites throughout the city of Gwangju in which their work will be displayed.

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Mike Nelson
Mike Nelson, who represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and has twice been nominated for the Turner Prize, is known for his intricate large-scale installation works that reinterpret the physicality and the internality of spaces. For the GB Commission, Nelson has researched the former Armed Forces’ Gwangju Hospital, a site of great intensity during the May 18th Gwangju Democratization Movement. As an artist who closely investigates the materiality of structures, Nelson sheds new light on the site by using component parts of the hospital, weaving the sense of absence in the vacant buildings within which time and history are imbued with the tangible presence of the ruins that remain.

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Adrián Villar Rojas
Argentinian artist Adrian Villar Rojas’ work interacts with the historical, socio-political, cultural and geographical layers of cities. Through his film presentation at the Asia Culture Center, Villar Rojas will address issues such as migration and the life in borderline areas such as the Demilitarized Zone between South and North Korea. Using Gwangju’s first modern cinema—built during the Japanese occupation (1910–45)—as the location for his new production, War of the Stars, Villar Rojas unfolds a layered narrative weaving together his previous films (such as The Most Beautiful Moment of War, made in the DMZ village of Yangji-ri) with scenes taken from cult classics such as 1922 Nosferatu or Star Wars. In doing so, he aims to combine new formal developments in two of his main lines of research: ontology and liminality in art and politics as power-based historical constructions.

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Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Contemporary artist and Palme d’Or award winning independent filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasthakul’s work explore themes concerning the modern Asian world’s scars from invasion by Western powers. For his presentation as part of the GB Commission, he will share his outlook on the world within the historic context of Gwangju. Weerasethakul will present a site-specific installation and performance at the former Armed Forces’ Gwangju Hospital.

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Kader Attia
The influence of history, politics and social injustice on a society form the framework of Kader Attia’s new work. For the GB Commission, Attia will employ multidisciplinary approaches to explore traditional structures of healing and coping with political traumatic experiences. The manifold perspectives he gives a voice to in his work will present a variety of methods from different cultures used to deal with loss and injury, and by doing so, to question the complex notion of the border between physical and the immaterial between the real and the virtual, the concrete and mystical worlds.

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More info:
Homepage www.gwangjubiennale.org
Telephone 82 62 608 4114