Gwangju Biennale Foundation announce theme for the 10th Gwangju Biennale

Gwangju Biennale Foundation has announced the theme for the 10th Gwangju Biennale, taking place from 5 September ? 9 November 2014. Burning Down the House explores the process of burning and transformation, a cycle of obliteration and renewal witnessed throughout history. Evident in aesthetics, historical events, and an increasingly rapid course of redundancy and renewal in commercial culture, the Biennale reflects on this process of, often violent, events of destruction or self-destruction?burning the home one occupies?followed by the promise of the new and the hope for change.

In the 1930s the critic Walter Benjamin coined the term ‘Tigersprung’ (the tiger’s leap) for a new model of history where the past is activated in and through the present within a culture industry that demands constant renewal. What can the ‘Tigerspung’ mean for today’s ‘tiger economies’ like South Korea in a context where economic and political powers deliver the eternally new of fashionable commodities and industrial progress at the apparent expense of a cultural past?

Burning Down the House looks at the spiral of rejection and revitalization that this process implies. The theme highlights the capacity of art to critique the establishment through an exploration that includes the visual, sound, movement and dramatic performance. At the same time, it recognises the possibility and impossibility within art to deal directly and concretely with politics. The energy, the materiality and processes of burning ? the manner in which material is changed and destroyed by flames into the residue of dramatic interventions or remnants of celebrations ? have long informed artistic practice. The transformative powers of fire are central to the way in which this exhibition has been imagined.

Rather than a simple reference to a leftfield pop anthem from the early 1980s, the title reflects the double significance of the proposed Biennale-concept. By fusing physical movement with political engagement, it animates the concept for the decennial of the Gwangju Biennale. When the US-Band Talking Heads were debating the title and chorus of ’Burning Down the House’, their most recognised track, members of the band remembered being at a Funkadelic-concert where George Clinton and the audience swapped calls to ‘Burn Down the House’. This hedonism by the P-Funk crowd on the dance floor was then turned into an anthem of bourgeois anxieties by the New York-based band. This dual meaning of pleasure and engagement serves as the defining spirit of the 10th Gwangju Biennale.

Burning Down the House examines the potential of art as movement, by exploring the efforts made by contemporary artists to address personal and public issues through individual and collective engagement, as well as demonstrating how challenging these efforts and their impacts have become. Contrary to museums, with their often hegemonic cultural policies and interest in denoting legacies and traditions, the biennale is a mobile and flexible event, which offers a spectrum of creative expressions that are immediate, contemporary and topical, making the proposed debate of art as movement fitting for the space of Gwangju ? both geopolitically and as an institutional alternative.

Burning Down the House, the 10th Gwangju Biennale, is curated by Jessica Morgan, Artistic Director of the Biennale and The Daskalopoulos Curator, International Art, Tate Modern. Fatos Ustek and Emiliano Valdes are Associate Curators for the Biennale, Enna Bae is Associate Curator for Performance and Teresa Kittler is Assistant Curator.

Press Contacts
Jisu Cook

International Relations and Communications Manager Gwangju Biennale Foundation
jisu.cook@gwangjubiennale.org / +82 (0) 62 608 4223

Sam Talbot
International Press Contact
Sutton PR
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Notes to Editors
Gwangju Biennale
The Gwangju Biennale, which was founded in September 1995 in the city of Gwangju in South Korea, is Asia's first and most prestigious contemporary art biennale. Founded in memory of spirits of civil uprising of the 1980 repression of the Gwangju Democratization Movement, the Gwangju Biennale presents a global perspective on contemporary art. Under the helm of a progression of international curators - including Massimiliano Gioni, 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. Centered in Gwangju's 8,100 square meter Biennale Hall in Jungoui Park, the Gwangju Biennale's presence has elevated the city of 1.4 million to become a cultural hub of East Asia. The Gwangju Biennale Foundation also hosts the Gwangju Design Biennale, which was founded in 2004. The Gwangju Biennale is co-hosted by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation and The Metropolitan City of Gwangju.

Jessica Morgan
Jessica Morgan has curated numerous group and solo exhibitions, including Saloua Raouda Choucair, Gabriel Orozco, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, The World as a Stage, Martin Kippenberger, Time Zones, Common Wealth, and the Turbine Hall Unilever Commissions, working with artists Tino Sehgal, Carsten Höller and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, since she joined Tate. Jessica Morgan was previously Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, where she organized exhibitions of work by, among others, Ellen Gallagher, Olafur Eliasson, Rineke Dijkstra, Marlene Dumas and Cornelia Parker. Prior to that she was an Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, where she curated the survey of Mona Hatoum. She has curated the exhibition of Urs Fischer for MOCA Los Angeles, Damien Ortega for ICA Boston and The Unruly History of the Readymade for Jumex Collection.

Jessica Morgan has published and lectured extensively on contemporary art and is a regular contributor to art journals including Parkett and Artforum. She holds an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London and a BA and MA in Art History from Cambridge University. She was a Mellon Fellow at the Yale Centre for British Art, Yale University and a Contemporary Art Curatorial Fellow at The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.

Emiliano Valdes
Emiliano Valdes is a curator based in London and Guatemala. Currently Curator and Co-Director of Proyectos Ultravioleta, a multifaceted platform for experimentation in contemporary art based in Guatemala City, he is also Associate Curator for the 10th Gwangju Biennale. Over the past 5 years, Emiliano was Curator/Head of Visual Arts at the Centro Cultural de Espana in Guatemala developing an exhibition programme which helped re-shape the local art scene. Previously he worked for institutions such as dOCUMENTA(13) (Kassel) and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, (Madrid), and curated several biennials in Central America. He has also published articles in international magazines such as ArtNexus, Arte al Dia, contemporary, and FlashArt, as well as being involved in numerous artist catalogues and books.

Fatos Ustek
Fatos Ustek is an independent curator and writer, from Istanbul, currently based in London. She is Associate Curator for the 10th Gwangju Biennale, and guest tutor at Vision Forum, Linkopings Universitet, Sweden. She curated, amongst other projects, an opera in five acts at David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF), London; the exhibition trilogy Now Expanded that took place at Kunstfabrik, Berlin; Tent, Rotterdam; and DRAF, London as well as various group shows in Europe and Turkey. She is member of AICA Tr and regular contributor to art publications such as Camera Austria International, Art Review, RES Art World / World Art. Ustek has written for international publications
such as the 6th Momentum Biennial Reader, Borusan Art Collection and numerous artist catalogues. Ustek acted as founding editor of Nowiswere Contemporary Art Magazine between 2008-2012, is the editor of the book Unexpected Encounters Situations of Contemporary Art and Architecture (Turkish Only, 2012) published by Zorlu Centre, Istanbul; and is the author of Book of Confusions, 2012, published by Rossi & Rossi, London.

Enna Bae
Enna Bae as an independent art producer and a coordinator based in Seoul, Korea, collaborated with many artists and curators to explore new directions in the contemporary art scene, through performances, film, exhibitions, lectures, and festivals. She has worked with Sunny Kim at Culture Station Seoul 284 (2012); Seoyoung Chung at the Kim Kim Gallery (2011); Tino Sehgal at the Korean National Museum of Contemporary Art (2012), Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (2011), Media City Seoul and the Gwangju Biennale (2010); Ujino Muneteru, Joo Yeon Park, Nina Biere and Marie Lund at Platform Seoul (2008); and William Forsyth and Nadia Lauro at the Springwave Festival (2007) among others. She has also participated as a program coordinator for the art educational program at Dongduk Women’s University (2013), catalogue editor for Media City Seoul (2010), assistant curator for Platform Seoul (2008), and festival dramaturgie for the Springwave Festival (2007). She received her DESS at the Management of Cultural Institutions at University Paris Dauphine in France (2005) after completing her BA in French Literature in Korea (1997).

Teresa Kittler
Teresa Kittler is an AHRC funded doctoral student in the History of Art Department at University College London. She received her BA from UCL in 2003 and MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006. She was research assistant at Tate Modern for Alighiero Boetti, game plan (2012). She is currently a teaching fellow at UCL and works as editorial assistant for the Oxford Art Journal.