Busan Biennale 2024 Review: Artistic Privilege Is Swept Aside

From acts of political solidarity to a refreshing self-awareness, Seeing in the Dark achieves something remarkable

The titular thematic of this biennial appears to manifest both as an interest in confronting the darkness of our current times and the darkness of that which occurs at a distance from the illuminated centres of our current society: that’s to say the bits of that society that aren’t the ‘highlights’ of capitalism and globalisation. This, of course is what curators are expected to do these days. In fact, you could say that it’s become something of a cliché in artistic circles. So it’s a credit to the artistic directors of this biennial, New Zealander Vera Mey and Belgian Philipp Pirotte, that their show rises above this norm.

In the lobby of the Biennale’s main venue – the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art – you’re welcomed by Omar Chowdhury’s video
BAN♡ITS (2024). It’s installed on an LED wall flanked by two portable speakers, the whole housed in an aluminium pavilion that looks like something you’d find at an outdoor wedding or a low-budget festival. In the museum it naturally exudes a guerrilla vibe, disrupting the overwhelming sense that you’re about to enter a bunker filled with the kind of weapons-grade ‘Culture’ that’s going to make you a more socially responsible individual. Self-improvement, after all, is why people visit biennials. They’re (generally) cheaper than therapy and less hassle than a yoga retreat.

Chowdhury’s video documents a group of bandits somewhere on the border between India and Bangladesh who describe themselves as ‘agents of chaos’ (before stating, perversely, that order needs chaos) and ‘a symbol of defiance for the dreams of the ultrapoor’, promise that they are going to throw a party with the money the artist gave them and are obsessed with actor Heath Ledger (‘he died for his art’) and the latter’s depiction of the Joker character in the Hollywood movie, The Dark Night (2008). At one point a ‘bandit’ (there’s no real evidence of actual banditry on offer, leaving the ‘bandits’ to occupy a symbolic space) asks the filmmaker if there’s a reason he is making the film. The reply: “Uh, not really, I’m just interested I guess.” “What a privilege,” the bandit answers. It’s this kind of self-awareness that is one of the defining and refreshing aspects of this exhibition. One floor up, Section 69ZD Employment Relations Act 2000 (2019) by Tongan artist John Vea, is a tea-break station that is only ‘activated’ at standardised break times as defined by New Zealand labour law.

Meanwhile, at one of the biennial’s offsite spaces, the Busan Modern and Contemporary History Museum, in Cha Ji Ryang’s extraordinary Like everything being seen has a bow (2024), a video and journal (the latter, on paper, exploded over a labyrinthine structure of walls) exploring an individual’s attempts to fit into the social systems of the world and the artworld, while moving between North America and Korea, and navigating a mixture of dreams and reality, the sentiment of Chowdhury’s bandit finds an echo: ‘When everything collapsed in a disaster,’ the journal entry for 1 May 2020 reads, ‘I felt that as an artist, I was indulging in luxury and pleasure for myself.’

The biennial as a whole draws consciously and heavily on Buddhist ideals of displacement and unassertiveness (although Han Mengyun’s video Night Sutras, 2024, does this by focusing on some of the negative implications of its assertiveness) and pirate assertiveness. Or, more precisely with regard to the latter, with anthropologist David Graeber’s posthumously published book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (2023), which deals with the ways in which pirates from Madagascar infected the local polity in a way that encouraged freedom and equality. Indeed a recording of Graeber himself surfaces at another of the biennial’s offsite spaces, Hansung1918 (also home to an installation by cultural theorist Fred Moten, with longtime collaborator and scholar Stefano Harney, and ‘visual storyteller’ Zun Lee), in his widow Nika Dubrovsky’s video triptych, Fight Club (2022), which serves to foreground the philosopher’s belief in dialogic methods of thinking, but comes across as a somewhat more worthy (or weapons-grade biennial-ish) than Chowdhury’s more humorous jaunt.

Back at the museum, the biennial (which features work by 62 artists or artist groups) is anchored throughout by generous displays of bodies of work by individual artists, rather than one-off displays. Yun Suknam’s Women of Resistance Series (2020–23), comprises paintings (in the traditional Chaesaekwa court-style) and drawings that memorialise generations of often forgotten female independence activists. Indonesian collective Taring Padi present Scarecrow Installation (2024), an archive of banners and prints made in solidarity with various peasant movements (among them, anti-sandmining, anti-industrialisation, fair incomes for farmers) in their homecountry. (Pirotte was on the selection committee for the controversial documenta 15, in which Taring Padi’s use of anti-Semitic tropes caused a scandal.) Palestinian collective, Subversive Film present another archival project, An Exercise in Assembling (2023–), a silent, subtitled collage of clips that document the power of coming together via numerous filmmakers’ recordings of historical liberation movements (among them Paul Seban’s Pourqoi la Grève, 1970, Gerard Guillaume’s Ho Chi Minh: Esquisse Pour un Portrait Politique, 1973; Mustafa Abu Ali, Jean Chamoun and Pino Adriano’s Tall Al-Zaatar, 1977) and the power of cinema, more generally in spreading the word. Such works also highlight solidarity as a subtheme of the exhibition, and to some degree its structuring element. All of the above, for example, find echoes in the work of Cambodian figurative painter Theanly Chov, whose portraits of individuals and groups, draw from life taking place around him, in moments of crisis or celebration. It’s these moments, particularly present in those bodies of work mentioned above, where artistic privilege is to some degree suspended, that both ground this biennial and provide viewers with both a way in to and, more crucially, a way onwards from the issues it raises. It’s rare for any biennial exhibition to pull off this last.

Busan Biennale: Seeing in the Dark, Various venues, Busan, 17 August – 20 October

From the Winter 2024 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.