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Events·Programs
Augmented Minds and the Incomputable
Public Program
“Augmented Minds and the Incomputable” interweaves the exhibition’s generative topics, examining the spectrum of the extended mind and challenging the structural divisions imposed upon corporeal, technological, and spiritual intelligence. This program invites philosophers, system thinkers, and researchers to discuss shamanism, cosmotechnics, neuroscience, and digital labor in relation with Korea’s visual cultures and communal trauma. The three sessions explore non-hierarchical approaches to replenish the body-mind during this time of massive suffering and mobilize plural and coeval conditions of being and belonging.
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.