Philippe Pirotte and Vera Mey have been selected as co-artistic directors of Busan Biennale 2024. Following an international open call last February, Busan Metropolitan City and the Busan Biennale Organizing Committee approved their joint-directors on 16 May. It is the first time the Biennale’s history that two people have been selected for the role.
An art historian, critic and curator, Pirotte is Adjunct Senior Curator at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). He held the position of rector at the influential Städelschule in Frankfurt and director of Kunsthalle Portikus between 2014–2020. He has served on the Documenta Commission (2019-2022), which selected ruangrupa as the artistic direction of Documenta 15 (2022). In 2016, Pirotte curated La Biennale de Montréal, titled Le Grand Balcon in reference to Jean Genet’s 1957 play Le Balcon, and was a member of the curatorial team of the Jakarta Biennale in 2017.
Art historian and independent curator Vera Mey is a PhD candidate in South East Asian art at SOAS in London. She was part of the founding team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, curating its residency programme. She co-founded the academic journal SOUTHEAST OF NOW: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art and in 2017 was part of the curatorial team for the survey SUNSHOWER: Contemporary art from Southeast Asia 1980s to now at the Mori Art Museum. She is also on the curatorial team for the forthcoming Spectres of Bandung: A Political Imagination of Asia-Africa at Gropius-Bau, Berlin, scheduled to open in October 2023.
‘The proposal submitted by the two co-artistic directors aligns with the committee’s efforts to expand representation of the Biennale’s core values of spontaneity, youth, and experimentation, and to achieve and amplify exhibition values rooted in regional character’, the committee said in a statement. ‘The proposed concept adopts specific cultural and spiritual ways of living in the world as an exhibition motif, while also amply reflecting the defining characteristics of Busan. Additionally, it considers the use of everyday spaces in the city and different forms of partnership with local alternative spaces, social activists, culture and art groups, and institutions.’
At the time of writing, the forthcoming edition of Busan Biennale is proposed to run from August–November 2024.
