Directed by the Danish curator Jacob Fabricius (currently artistic director for Kunsthal Aarhus in his native land), who was appointed in July of last year, the exhibition takes as its generating concept the interpretation of works of art and their translation into another artform.
Eight Korean and three fiction writers from Denmark, Columbia and USA, representing different generations, genres and ways of writing, were invited to visit Busan in late 2019 and then commissioned to write stories or poems ‘around or about’ the city.
The stories structure the exhibition’s ‘chapters’ and the poems provide ‘intermezzos’. Each of the 67 participating artists and 11 musicians (from around the world) was asked to create a work in response to one of the texts.
“For me, books are open. The beginning of a book is not its first sentence, and the end is not its last. Books are expansive, almost like voracious entities”