Artistic director of the 2016 Gwangju Biennale named

Maria Lind has been appointed artistic director for the 2016 Gwangju Biennale. "I will make sure next year's Gwangju Biennale will be a place where artists, the public, people working in the art industry , and local residents gather to discuss, relate and communicate in the name of art," Lind said during a precent press conference. The previous edition of Gwangju Biennale, curated by DIA Art Foundation director Jessica Morgan, was marked by controversy and led to the resignation of Biennale Foundation president Lee Yong-Woo.
Image: Maria Lind

Jessica Morgan talks about her Gwangju Biennale

Burning Down the House, the 10th edition of the Gwangju Biennale opens today and runs to 9 November. Curated by Jessica Morgan, the exhibition places a special focus on politically motivated and insurgent art , as well as works that address local history. ARTINFO's Wendy Vogel spoke to her about what makes this year's biennale particularly explosive. Read more...

A dark exploration of destruction

The Gwangju Biennale Foundation has announced the theme of the 10th Gwangju Biennale (5 September - 9 November), which artistic director Jessica Morgan says will present "a very dark exploration of destruction." Titled Burning Down the House, the biennale explores burning and transformation, a cycle of obliteration and renewal witnessed throughout history, and looks at the spiral of rejection and revitalisation this process implies. Read more...

Director of 2014 Gwangju Biennale announced

Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan has been named as the director of the 2014 Gwangju Biennale. Morgan was appointed as The Daskalopoulos Curator by the London museum in 2010 and has specialised in international art focusing on non-Western regions such as the Middle East and South America.
Image: Jessica Morgan

Gwangju presents a series of new follies in urban space

Previously conceived of and presented as an integral part of the Gwangju Design Biennale, the second edition of the Gwangju Folly Project will be held as an independent event this year. Nikolaus Hirsch (director), Philipp Misselwitz and Eui Young Chun (curators) have developed a curatorial approach for the event, which uses the folly as a tool of enquiry to address the potential of public space today - in contemporary Gwangju and globally.

Gwangju Folly II will commission new works from architects, artists, collectives and writers including: David Adjaye & Taiye Selasi, Ai Weiwei, Seok Hong Go & Mihee Kim, Rem Koolhaas & Ingo Niermann, Raqs Media Collective, Do-HoSuh, Superflex and Eyal Weizman.

Curating the Gwangju Biennale

Carol Yinghua Lu is one of the six co-artistic directors appointed to curate the 2012 Gwangju Biennale.In a piece published on the Frieze blog she talks about the process they went through - they discovered more differences among their curatorial approaches and intellectual positions than affinity - that led them to settle on the title Roundtable as a way to describe an approach that allowed them to articulate their respective interests and concepts through six sub-themes. Read more...

Image: The co-artistic directors of ROUNDTABLE, The 9th Gwangju Biennale, 2012

Artists announced for the 9th Gwangju Biennale

The 90 artists and collectives selected for ROUNDTABLE: The 9th Gwangju Biennale have been announced. You can see the list here
Image: Dane Mitchell, detail Celestial Fields, 2012. Mitchell is one of the artists selected for ROUNDTABLE

Dane Mitchell commissioned to make a new work for the Gwangju Biennale

Dane Mitchell has been selected for the 2012 Gwangju Biennale, which runs from 7 September to 11 November. This year's edition is being directed by six curators - Nancy Adajania (India), Mami Kataoka (Japan), Wassan al-Kudhairi (Qatar), Sun Jung Kim (Korea), Alia Swasticka (Indonesia) and Carol Yinghua Lu (China). Mitchell is also in the lineup of artists selected for the 2012 Liverpool Biennale.
Image: Dane Mitchell, detail Celestial Fields, 2012

9th Gwangju Biennale's theme is Roundtable

The team of six co-artistic directors appointed to organise the 9th Gwangju Biennale have announced the theme for their edition of the event. In a statement issued recently they say: "ROUNDTABLE allows us to reflect on our shared contemporaneity at a time when the tremendous momentum of ecological, political and economic change has radically transformed our global reality. The image of the round table is associated with political summit, where various urgent agendas are brought together and its participants convene to reach a renewal of understanding."

The six co-artistic directors are from Korea, China, Japan, Indonesia and Qatar. Nancy Adajania is a Bombay-based cultural theorist and independent curator. Wassan Al-Khudhairi is the director and chief curator at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Art, Dohan. Mami Kataoka is chief curator at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Sunjung Kim is a Seoul-based independent curator and professor at Korea National University of Arts. Carol Yinghua Lu is an art critic and curator who works in Beijing and is also a contributing editor for Frieze. Alia Swastika is a curator, project manager and writer based in Jakarta.

The 9th Gwangju Biennale runs from 7 September - 11 November 2012.

Six curators appointed as co-artistic directors of the 2012 Gwangju Biennale

Six curators, all women, have been appointed as co-artistic directors of the 2012 Gwangju Biennale - Nancy Adajania (India), Mami Kataoka (Japan), Wassan al-Kudhairi (Qatar), Sun Jung Kim (Korea) and Carol Yinghua Lu (China). As usual the Gwangju Biennale will coincide with the Busan Biennale.

Eighth Gwangju Biennale

Tilted 10,000 Lives and directed by Massimiliano Gioni, the Eighth Gwangju Biennale will develop as a sprawling investigation of the relationships that bind people to images and images to people. Gioni says: "The exhibition will engage our obsession with images and our need to create substitutes, effigies, avatars and stand-ins for ourselves and our loved ones. It is this perennial state of iconophilia, this maniacal love of images that we wish to examine in Gwangju."

The exhibition title is borrowed from Maninbo (10,000 Lives) a yet unfinished 30 volume epic conceived by Korean author Ko Un while imprisoned in 1980 for his participation in the South Korean democratic movement. Held in solitary confinement, as a means to preserve his sanity, Ko envisaged a poem which described every single person he had met throughout his life, including historical figures and fictional characters encountered in literature. Upon his release he began writing the 3,800 poems that compose Maninbo (10,000 Lives), a magnum opus that reads as a personal encyclopedia of humanity. From the Biennale Media release

The Gwangju Biennale runs from 3 September - 7 November 2010.

Image: Eighth Gwangju Biennale masthead