Spirits Rising: Anti-Systemic Kinship in Korea

Laurel Kendall, Seong Nae Kim, Yang Jong-sung, Yoon Yeolsu           

​February 23, 11am–1pm KST      

Join us on Zoom by clicking here (Zoom Webinar ID: 971 0878 5224) or on the Gwangju Biennale Foundation’s Facebook page.      

“Spirits Rising: Anti-Systemic Kinship in Korea” investigates somatic practices, ritual systems, and formations of collective care as they relate to shamanism across the divided Korean peninsula and its transgressive potential. Laurel Kendall, anthropologist and curator, discusses the work of Korean shamans as a living and vital social practice that addresses the changing needs and anxieties of living people. She describes how painted images work with the shaman as seats for the mansin’s personal gods. Yang Jong-sung, director of The Museum of Shamanism, introduces the ceremonial forms and relics on display in the Biennale exhibition, including amulets, rare Kut manuals, and paintings and details their engagement with grievances at the root of communal bonds through gods, as well as social inequality and collective trauma. Yoon Yeolsu, director of the Gahoe Minhwa Museum, presents a selection of folk paintings and religious amulets to propose the timeliness of examining practices of countryside rituals and oral storytelling. Academic Seong Nae Kim discusses the ways in which the legacies of the Jeju 4.3 are transmitted across generations and ritually reenacted in post-memory practices through spirit possessions, ancestral familial rites, and public shamanic commemorations to revive social trust and allow for pathways into of anti-systemic kinship across class and ethnic divides.

The Incomputable and the Incalculable                                                                                 

​Yuk Hui with Karen Sarkisov                                                                             

February 23, 4–5:30pm KST

Join us on Zoom by clicking here (Zoom Webinar ID: 987 9167 8365) or here.

The Incomputable and the Incalculable” features a lecture by philosopher Yuk Hui that draws on the concept of recursivity as a novel way of tracing the history of modern western philosophy, one in which twentieth-century computational theory seems to vindicate the intuitions of the German Romantics and Idealists about the inner workings of the world and nature. But is everything reducible to recursive algorithms and therefore computable? Does this rationalization not run the risk of ultimately making the world itself disappear? How do we distinguish between what is computable, incomputable and what is incalculable? Does the incalculable merely gesture towards a mysticism or does it in the contrary reveal a new form of rationalization? A conversation with curator Karen Sarkisov will discuss the notion of incalculability and its relation to the current technological paradigm.

Metabolic States of Intelligence 

With Maya Indira Ganesh, Matteo Pasquinelli, and Dmitry Paranyushkin 

February 23, 6–7:30 p.m. KST 

Join us on Zoom by clicking here (Zoom Webinar ID: 991 8733 3940) or here.

“Metabolic States of Intelligence” inquires into machine intelligence and the extended mind explored through philosophical and ethical implications of algorithmically generated information feeds as learning and coping mechanisms today. Technology researcher and writer Maya Indira Ganesh examines the poetics and politics of AI metaphors and asks from where and how new metaphors might arise. Philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli discusses his research around the plurality of knowledge models in the age of “monotheistic” AI. Biennale participant and choreographer Dmitry Paranyushkin introduces the idea of dynamic diversity through networked mapping and corporeal techniques while centralizing characteristics of immunity and resilience today.