13th Gwangju Biennale — Minds Rising Spirits Tuning

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Rising Together

Reconfiguring the gallery as a prism, Rising Together invites audiences to pass through a spectrum of commemorative aesthetics, virtual terrains, forms of gathering, and sacred emblems of protection and recovery.  John Gerrard’s intensive engagement with neural networks and deep learning and Ana María Millán’s virtual world-building exercise both animate protagonists as a means of spatializing narrative logic and chronicling ecological precarity, gender disparity, and state-led militarist violence. Kate Crawford, Vladan Joler, and Matteo Pasquinelli present diagrammatic lexicons that reveal the complex networks of human labor, data extraction, wealth distribution, and planetary exhaustion. Moon Kyungwon generates a platform of collective intelligence that weaves the building’s history as social tapestry, while Outi Pieski’s monumental textile architecture of hand-woven knots inspires and celebrates convivial and non-hierarchical modes of creation. New commissions and historical works by artists like seminal Korean painter Min Joung-Ki, a pioneer of the Minjung art movement, and photographer Gap-chul Lee delve into and map hidden aspects of Korea’s spiritual life, landscapes, and devotional practices. Rising Together also assembles ceremonial amulets, ritual paintings, and relics integral to The Museum of Shamanism and Gahoe Minhwa Museum, both major collections of Korean Shamanism and folk painting. In the spirit of the commons, the ground floor of the Biennale Hall provides free access for the very first time, proposing a setting for an intergenerational public to return to, circumambulate, and communicate with Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning and, in turn, its  vocabularies that reckon with the volatile state of this world.