August 13–15, 2021, 1pm
Festival, workshop, screening, and talk examining art, gender, generation, education, community, climate crisis, environmentalism, equality, LGBTQ+, and locality. Held both virtually and in-person in Barim, Gwangju, South Korea.
Zero Makes Zero, a public art project selected by Arts Council Korea in 2020 to run participatory workshop and lecture programs, will host its eponymous Zero Makes Zero Festival from August 13 to 15, 2021. The festival will look back on all the programs held by Zero Make Zero from October 2020 to June 2021 and explore various themes surrounding public art that the project aimed to share.
Zero Makes Zero Festival meshes virtual elements, through its YouTube channel and official website, with in-person events held in Gwangju, South Korea, allowing local civic participants to share and discuss their work and ideas with prominent artists, designers, architects, and activists.
Design studio Aloud Lab will open the festival with a retrospection of its workshops, Design for Zero. Past workshop participant Gyungyoung Min will join as a panel member to explore topics such as the compatibility of art and parenting (Commoning for Childcare & Art) and touchpoints within the Sum++City workshop, which delved into the issue of climate change and approaches to it through communal perspectives and individual practices (Soeun Kim, Youngju Kim, Chisu Won, Jiseon Heo).
Talks with specialists in various fields will also be held. This includes an examination of the process of creating and deinstalling exhibitions from a Vegan perspective, and a subsequent manual produced by the internal workshop (Hwayong Kim, Sunwoo Nam, Taein Park, Hyejin Yeo, Kyudong Lee, Mokhwa Lee) Veganism Exhibition Manual, and discussing the use of alternative materials and creation ethics (Drawing Without Death: New Landscape on the Workbench) by Swh/Sunwoo, Yeju, and Gahyeon Lee. There will also be conversations about issues surrounding artificial intelligence and education (The Future of Education Now) by Youjin Jeon and Seungjoon Choi and confronting aging from a feminist perspective (Feminism after Sixty, Waving Grey Hair) by Youngok Kim.
Several on-site events will take place, including Becoming-Queer, a workshop led by Korea Queers that explores and shares safe spaces for queer persons and various minorities and a screening and talk for Coming To You, a film about the activities of an LGBTQ+ parent support group in Korea.
Meanwhile, the Zero Makes Zero official website, will host exclusive online content, including the “Becoming-Queer Mapping Project” and “Veganism Exhibition Manual ver.1.” Lectures from last April and May, including “Yesterday’s Tomorrow (Eunjeon Hong, Hyojeong Chae, Myungae Choi, Juhyun Kang, Hyunsuk Kang, Design for Earth, Uiryeong Jeon, Rayoung Lee, and Yun Hwang), “Museum, Art Museum, and Zoo (Sohyun Park, Heejung Son, and Sunwoo Nam),” and “What to Make; How to Make (Nami Kwon, Not Ours, Aloud Lab, swh/Sunwoo, Jaewook Koh, and Mina Kim),” will also be made available on the Zero Makes Zero YouTube channel for the duration of the festival.
Zero Makes Zero is a platform that elevates the voices of the marginalized and under-represented and examines the structure of the art scene. It captures the movements and actions of creators, citizens, and activists across systems and genres. Zero Makes Zero was co-curated by Barim, an art space in Gwangju (Director Min-hyung Kang), Woman Open Tech Lab based in Euljiro, Seoul (Director Youjin Jeon), and artist Hwayong Kim.
