Conceived exclusively for online audiences, works by Ana Prvački, Kira Nova, and nasa4nasa are presented in the form of episodes and web series on the Biennale’s social media channels and streamed on its website. These artists explore hybrid forms of individual and collective expression, protocols of intimacy, and codes of spontaneity, centering relationships among bodies transiting between the spiritual, the physical, and the virtual, beyond the grip of pandemic-induced alienation and social distancing.

Kira Nova’s series encourages viewers to access their extraordinary potential, whether through butoh techniques, cellular memories of animal, plant, or insect pasts, or other improvisations that embrace our limbs’ intelligence. nasa4nasa experiments with bodily practices of synchronicity, collaboration, symbiosis, and communal intelligence that interacts with and sometimes interrupts virtual mass consumption. Addressing topics that have come to define contemporary culture in Korea and beyond, ranging from environmental matters to movement and meditation exercises, Ana Prvacki’s videos attempt the subversion of social anxiety through the comedic potential of faux pas.

“Augmented Minds and the Incomputable” interweaves the exhibition’s generative topics, examining the spectrum of the extended mind and challenging the structural divisions imposed upon corporeal, technological, and spiritual intelligence. This program invites philosophers, system thinkers, and researchers to discuss shamanism, cosmotechnics, neuroscience, and digital labor in relation with Korea’s visual cultures and communal trauma. The three sessions explore non-hierarchical approaches to replenish the body-mind during this time of massive suffering and mobilize plural and coeval conditions of being and belonging.

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.

Rising to the Surface: Practicing Solidarity Futures examines the tidal currents of people’s movements, the recurring spectre of oppressive regimes, and the inventive tools of current citizen protests. This forum brings together scholars, artists, activists, and civil society actors from around the world to address grassroots struggles in a discussion of shared vocabularies on strategies of public dissent, civic advocacy, healing public trauma, indigenous solidarity, and environmental activism. Online sessions focus on algorithmic violence and digital surveillance; struggles to protect land and waters from extractive infrastructures; and the feminist legacy of democratization movements from the 1980s onward.

Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning intends to consider critically questions of scale, sustainability, and value intimacy to ensure that the conversations and shared learning generated by the collective labor of biennale production can be accessed by wider audiences. Several of the artists and team members conducting site visits and research in Gwangju and nearby Jeju experienced recent political upheaval and people’s movements in their own regions. The site visits in Gwangju included meetings at the 5.18 Archive, May Mothers House, and Gwangju Trauma Centre, among others. While artistic works will not directly connect with these sites, it is important to us that the research process includes the experience of crucial local sites of mourning, dissent, care, and recovery.