Main Exhibition
Exhibition
Feedback Effect
A feedback effect is generated by the lack of space between two emitters: a sonic consequence of saturation. The first floor of the exhibition shows urban life, saturated with human presence, eliciting an impression of visual claustrophobia in the visitors who are made to follow a labyrinthine path. It shows a world which has become an echo chamber, where everything is contiguous, contagious, and immediate. Urban waste, global congestion and dissonance, whether chromatic or formal, are visual equivalents of the feedback effect. Space, whose division is always geopolitical, is the bond that joins together all emancipatory struggles, from feminism to decolonization to LGBTQIA+ rights.
In a world saturated with human activities, both interhuman and interspecies relations have intensified. Applying the feedback effect’s sonic pattern to the landscape, the exhibition space centers itself around the effects of industrialization upon natural ecosystems. The law of profitability to which the countryside and forests are subjected, as well as the disappearance of wild ecosystems, have caused a wave of animal extinctions, due to a historically unprecedented regime of proximity. In this section of the exhibition, the artist considers the ubiquitous presence of humans, and the end of wilderness.
Polyphonies
In this section the viewer encounters the pattern of polyphony, as an intertwining of sounds coming from diverse sources. This floor brings together different kinds of dialogue with non-human spheres, from machines to animals. Artists adopt an ecosystemic gaze upon the world: focusing upon relations between beings rather than objects; addressing the complexity of the human milieu, they represent space as a chain of agents. The main impact of climate change upon art can be said to be the repositioning of the artist as immersed into a complex and overwhelming situation, as opposed to the image of the environment as a stage for human action.
Primordial Sound
This section features a third pattern, the primordial sound known as “ôm” in the Hindu tradition, which contemporary science considers the residual sound of the original Big Bang. This floor brings together artists who address cosmic space and immensity. It constitutes a vast landscape, like a plain or a savannah, evoking a planet without human beings, a desert, a jungle, in a darker atmosphere which echoes the dimensions of the art projects and their ambition to reach new spaces. The recourse to archaic traditions and vernacular thought crystallizes around the figure of the shaman, as a guide into non-human worlds (the origin of pansori), or around prehistoric motifs.
Categorized under the theme of primordial sound, this section looks at the notion in reverse, as infinitely small. Examining molecular decomposition, it creates bridges between the immense and the infinitesimal. The participating artists focus on social structures and history, all that makes history today as belonging to an invisible sphere: viruses, degrees of extra heat, pesticides that sterilize the soil, the imperceptible melting of ice caps, Glyphosate, carbon dioxide, the tear gas used by the police, endocrine disruptors, the imperishable pollutants contained in kitchen utensils, and so on. Perceiving our world in a molecular mode, the artists examine the microscopic components of both nature and society, as though adopting the role of molecular anthropologists
Resonance
The Yangnim neighborhood is where the 15th Gwangju Biennale has chosen to create further resonances across Gwangju. Ten artists located in eight different venues throughout Yangnim present works to further expand on the vibrations from the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall, providing an echo to PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century. Here, the residents, artists, and creatives from Yangnim come together to generate further resonances of the biennale. Resonance is defined as “the quality in a sound of being deep and reverberating.”