10,000 Lives: The Eight Gwangju Biennale

Announces Artists and Exhibits

September 3, 2010 - November 7, 2010

Press preview September 2, 2010

Gwangju, South Korea

www.10000lives.org

www.gb.or.kr

The Gwangju Biennale Foundation and Director Massimiliano Gioni are proud to announce an initial list of artists and exhibition details for 10,000 Lives, the 8th Gwangju Biennale. Constructed as a large thematic exhibition, the Biennale will develop a sprawling investigation of the relationships that bind people to images and images to people.

Held in Gwangju’s venerable Biennale Hall and neighboring City Museum, and Folk Museum, with works by more than 100 artists, realized between 1901 and 2010, as well as several new commissions, the exhibition will be configured as a temporary museum in which both artworks and cultural artifacts from more than 25 countries are brought together to examine our obsession with images.

“Each day billions of images are produced and consumed,” explains director Massimiliano Gioni. “More than 500.000 images per second are uploaded on a single website. Americans alone take an average of 550 snap shots per second. A record 14 million dollars has been paid for the right to reproduce one single image. We seek comfort in images and carry out wars in their name; we congregate around images, we adore them, crave them, consume them and destroy them.”

Borrowing its title from the writings of Korean poet Ko Un, the exhibition 10,000 Lives engages our love for images and our need to create substitutes, effigies, and stands-in for ourselves and our loved ones.

“From ancient mythology we learn that images were created to capture the shadow of lovers and to commemorate the life of the ones we had lost,” continues Gioni. “The exhibition unravels as a gallery of portraits or as a dysfunctional family album. It tells the story of people through the images they create and images they leave behind. And it follows the lives of images themselves, tracing their endless metamorphosis, from funerary statue to commercial propaganda, from religious icon to scientific tool, from a mirror of ourselves to a projection of our desires.”

Along with the work of contemporary artists, the exhibition includes found photographs and cultural artifacts that exemplify the multifarious existence of images, placing them within a wider cultural context. As in an international exposition, the border between documents, relics, art works and images will at times appear toblur.

The 100 life size sculptures of the Rent Collection Courtyard relate the suffering of Chinese peasants at the hands of a tyrannical landlord. Created between 1965 (original 1965 and 1974-78)???? by students, artists, and faculty of the Sichuan Fine Arts institution, the series has become one of the founding images of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Presented in its entirety in the Biennale, the diorama illustrates the conflation of art, politics and collective belief, and the power of images to educate and persuade..

The photographs from Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng Prison compose a harrowing memento of the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide.  Among the most touching and ethically complex images in recent history; the regime systematically photographed each prisoner, knowing they would be executed.  The portraits now stand as the only survivors,  silent witnesses of otherwise anonymous lives.

Leon Battista Alberti wrote that images, like friendship, make the absent present.  A gigantic archive compiled by curator and collector Ydessa Hendeles contains more than 3000 photographs of people holding teddy bears, presenting images  as the progeny of nostalgia

 How are images constructed? How are they fabricated and how do they circulate? These are some of the questions raised by the work of Thomas Bayrle, Paul Sharits, Stan Van Der Beek, Christopher Williams, among others. As one example, the 1950s experimental films of Katsuhiro Yamaguchi take the mechanics of vision apart: to borrow a title from one film, the act of seeing becomes an “adventure for the eyes.”

Hans Peter-Feldmann, Tom Holert and Seth Price look at how images are distributed through media, such as Feldmann’s magniloquent 9/12 Front Page, that arranges scores of newspapers from September 12, 2001. Sherrie Levine and Sturtevant question copyrights and ownership by replicating works by other artists, while Shinro Ohtake reassembles fragments of visual culture, by collecting thousands of cut out photographs and arranging them in dozens of scrap books.

Iconophilia, the love of images, often conceals a deep fear of them. Gestures of violence and iconoclasm appear in E.J. Bellocq’s defaced early 20^th century photographs, and in Huang Yong Ping’s fractured Buddha. A new video by Cyprien Galliard looks at Egyptian statuary and its demise. In a Yang-ah Ham video, actors adore an effigy made of chocolate, while Harun Farocki documents processions and pilgrimages to sacred statues.

The exhibition 10,000 Lives also includes examples of works born outside the traditional confinements of the art world. Examples include Morton Bartlett and James Castle, who each  lived in a world of fantasy with images and fetishes as their closest friends.

Newly commissioned works will include a visual diary chronicling 246 days in the life of Korean artists collective Eye Glass Shop. Jakub Ziolkowski will present a suite of more than 60 drawings inspired by George Bataille’s Story of the Eye, exposing voyeuristic and erotic tensions implied in the act of seeing. Alice Kok’s video messages reunite people across borders, while Artur Zmiejwski will premiere a new film in which blind people paint the world as they see it.

The image of the victim and the iconography of the martyr are analyzed in the paintings of Jean Fautier, the suicide bomber posters collected by the magazine Useful Photography, the sculptures of Katharina Fritsch and the videos by Hito Steyerl and Liu Wei.

The construction of the self through images and media is a recurring theme throughout the exhibition. Celebrities and illustrious nobodies appear in the photographs of Andre De Dienes, Hangyong Kim, Namhan Photo Studio and Philip Lorca di Corcia. For the project My Village, filmmaker Wu Wenguang distributed video cameras to rural Chinese workers and asked them to film their towns: the hundreds of hours recorded by the farmers capture everyday life at the margins of the Chinese empire, composing a choral encyclopedia. In Visible World Fischli and Weiss align thousands of snap-shots on a 90 foot light table, presenting reality in all its sublime banality. The 60 Year Portraits, rescued by collector Tong Bingxue, chronicle the life of Ye Jingly, who had his portrait taken every year from 1901 to 1968.

Swarming with pictures, the exhibition attempts to  become an image-making machine itself. In Exhibition in Real Time n.4 (Leave on the walls a photographic trace of your fleeting visit), a seminal 1972 conceptual work by Franco Vaccari, visitors are invited to pin to the walls their self-portraits shot in a photo booth installed in the exhibition galleries. MENTION OPEN CALL FOR IMAGES???

Swiss healer Emma Kunz and Chinese shaman Guo Fengyi infused an almost desperate faith in the power of images. With their medicine drawings and their therapeutic abstractions they tried to create images that could save the world.

An initial list of 122 artists is available on request, and a final list of artists and projects will be announced in August 2010

About the Gwangju Biennale

Founded in 1995 in memory of the spirit of civil uprising resulting from the 1980 repression of the Gwangju Democratization Movement, the Gwangju Biennale is Asia's oldest and most prestigious biennial of contemporary art. Under the helm of previous curators that include Kerry Brougher, Sukwon Chang, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Hou Hanru, Honghee Kim, Yongwoo Lee, Youngchul Lee, Kwangsoo Oh, Wankyoung Sung and Harald Szeemann, the Gwangju Biennale has established itself as a highlight of the international contemporary art biennale circuit. 

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