The main exhibition of the 15th Gwangju Biennale is entered via a gloomy “sound tunnel” filled with dissonant noise and leading into a silent room resembling an abandoned office space. The ceiling tiles of Cinthia Marcelle’s installation There Is No More Place in This Place (2019–24) are disarrayed as if by some natural disaster, and the scrambling of the senses effected by these two environments marks a promising start to an exhibition that pledges to “reflect our new spatial conditions and the upheavals of the Anthropocene.”
Braceli’s project advances the absent Reticulárea’s many lessons around collaboration, collectivity, and decentralization. Here is a model of planetarity and “deborderization” appropriate to an historical moment of profound polarization. Instead of self-sufficiency and permanence, both Reticuláreas—the one dismantled and sequestered, and the one produced by nomadic gestures that weave hybrid materialities—insist on the expansive net as an emancipatory model for a world in need of connections.
Fittingly for this month’s program, which features several pieces on how culture might foster solidarities without becoming exclusionary, the relevance of Reticulárea extends far beyond the borders of its homeland and the moment of its first exhibition in 1969. It offers a template for how art can hold people in relation even as the physical infrastructures of the society in which they live are broken down, and how the ideas and feelings provoked by those relations can move across nations and through generations.
Steirischer Herbst has a history of controversy: in 1981, a Neo-Nazi dumped a cartload of manure in front of a Hermann Nitsch exhibition; in 1988, Hans Haacke’s restaged National Socialist-monument was burned to the ground. In 1998, Christoph Schlingensief, with his announcement that he planned to “bring as many homeless people as possible to Graz,” caused outrage among the local FPÖ. Niwa’s approach is rather gentle by comparison, yet resonates with the title of this year’s edition: “Horror Patriae”, horror of the fatherland.
Survival Kit is a festival born out of necessity in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, when people began leaving Latvia to find work elsewhere, shrinking Riga’s population by about a third. Its mission was to animate the empty spaces left behind by people and industry… Many works in this year’s edition, curated by Jussi Koitela, playfully straddle the line between fact and fiction, exploring degrees of constructed truths that hold special meaning to the city residents. Based in a former civic legislation building where bureaucrats once made decisions, and in a local hub across the river, the exhibition forms a bridge between Riga’s different hemispheres, timelines, and generations.
Ruins aestheticize the past through the presentation of the fragment: not the historical past, but a generalized and reified past from which something great can be retrieved or transmitted. Are the former benches meant to suggest the mythologized past that makes up a large portion of the content of so much ultimately empty political speech? A fake past would be an appropriate setting for the LED sculptures SO GOOD and BAD, whose narrowly political slogans are derived from a two-party system in which candidates propose alternate paths back to better times.
It Is Essential to Be There
