10 News

THE ART NEWSPAPER, No. 217, OCTOBER 20(10

Biennial news and reports

Navel gazing
The tenth edition of the Taipei Biennial. curated by liongjohn Lin and Tirdad Zolghadr, explores the global phenomenon of biennials. Zolghadr said: "*Instead of using art as a earnera, we wanted to look at the camera itself." Many local artists s1rongly oppose the Flora Expo. a horticultural show that overlaps with the biennial (until 14 November), so Shi Jin-hua is showing X Trees in Tfipei, 20t10, a pile of stones that serves as a monument to the trees that have been uprooted frorn forests in laiwan and replanted on the site of the flower show. The work refers to Joseph Beuys' 7(X)O Oaks. begun in 1982. C.G.

Western emphasis at South Korea's Gwangju Biennale

Although some installations honour the revolutionary spirit of the city
GWAN(iJt. The eighth edition of something that holds particular

Performance in Toulouse
Ambidextrous antics, naked hula-hooping and the "longest video clip in the world"- the revival of performance art is the theme of the 20)10 edition of the Printemps de Septembre a Toulouse festival (until 17 October). which celebrates its 20(h anniversary this year. More than 30 venues are showing works that celebrate the "live factor" of performance art and explore the new challenges of the discipline. "A Form for Every Kind of Action" is curated by Eric Mangion with Isabellc (Gaudeflroy and features pieces by artists including Francis Ali,s and Pierre Bismuth. E-.

South Korea's Gwangju Biennale has drawn criticism for under-representing Asian artists. Addressing complaints at the opening of the biennale, the artistic director Massimiliano Gioni answered: "Of course this show is biased, but only because I am a human being. This is not a show where every country can be represented. It is not the United Nations or the Olympics of art," he added. Gioni has chosen items created by 134 artists between 1901 and 2010, with the majority of the 30 different nationalities represented hailing from Europe and the US. This year's biennale (until 7 November) is about "1presenting a sprawling investigation of the relationships that bind people to images, and images to people," he said. Despite the biennale's western emphasis, there are large swathes of the exhibition devoted to regional pieces such as a series of 62 studio portraits taken between 1907 and 1968 of Chinese entrepreneur Ye Jinglu. Unearthed by journalist and collector long Bingxue, the archive tracks the history of Ye's life through the lens, while

significance

on

the

30th

Political point: Rent Collection Courtyardhas not been exhibited in an Asian country outside China

also unveiling gradual stylistic changes to photographic portraiture over the course of the
20th century. One room is dedicated to Rent Collection CourtYard, 1974-78, 103 life-

sized copper-plated, fibreglass sculptures of struggling Chinese peasant farmers. This was the first time the figures, which were commissioned in 1965 and made by students and teachers

at

the

Sichuan

Fine

Arts

Institute, had been exhibited in an Asian country outside China. Many of the installations wholeheartedly honour the revolutionary spirit of Gwangju,

New Zealand earthquake

The sixth edition of Scape, New Zealand's biennial of art in public spaces, which was scheduled to open in Christchurch on 24 September, has been postponed owing to a 7.0 magnitude earthquake on 4 September. The quake caused $1.9bn of damage, including considerable damage to the biennial's Public Art Walkway. The biennial's organiser, the Art & Industry Biennial Trust, had high hopes of reaching a wider audience with this year's presentation, having appointed a new curatorial group in October 2009. Deborah McCormick, the director of the trust, said that the board will meet soon to consider a future date for Scape. E-S.

Polish biennale takes to the streets

w0)z. For the first time since its inception in 2003. the Fokus l.odz Biennale has received proper funding from the City of Lodz. with a budget of C500,000. The 2003 edition only received E50,000. It is the most expensive event Ryszard Wasko, the artistic director of the biennale, has staged in his 40-year career. Wasko. who left Lodz in 2008 because he "had nothing else to do in the city", was enticed back to the city by the mayor and the promise of a proper budget. Previous editions of the biennale were held in 2003 and 2006 and were based on a series of exhibitions conceived by Wasko in 1981 entitled "Construction in Process". Over 50 international artists have convened in Poland for the third edition of the Fokus Lodz Biennale, which runs from II September to 10 October. Entitled "From the Liberty Square to Independence Square", the biennale is being held in spaces along Lodz's main street. Ulica Piotrkowska. Wasko said that securing venues was complicated by post-communism restitution claims that continue to hinder property ownership in Lodz. "You would need five years to organise this kind of project in the west,' he said. "But I wanted to treat the street in different contexts: as an architectural, urban, social and political situation." Participating artists include Tacita Dean. Dan Perjovschi, Tom,is Ruller and Luc Tuymans. Polish artist Zuzanna Janin, who is presenting her film Majka from the Movie, 2009, agrees that the Lodz Biennale is a special place to exhibit. "Ryszard Wasko is an exceptional personality on the Polish art scene. The

idea of using Piotrkowska as a space for the presentation of the works is fantastic," she said. Wasko said that the City of Lodz has now put in place legislature that commits it to fund the biennale every two years until 2020. Richard Unwin

Gdansk's shipyard will be home to new festival

The Wyspa Institute of Art, in Gdansk, Poland, has announced plans for a new festival, "Altemativa", to run from 20f1012. Funded by the City of Gdansk and the European Union, the festival is part of the city's application to become European Capital of Culture in 2016. "Alternativa" will take place in the Gdansk Shipyard, where the workers' strikes of 1980 triggered the disintegration of the communist bloc and the festival will take its cue from this atmosphere of political momentum and its possibilities, Wyspa director Aneta Szylak has been appointed the festival's artistic director. If the event proves successful, it is hoped it will continue every five years, becoming a prominent feature of Gdansk's cultural landscape. R.U.
(GDANSK.

anniversary of the South Korean democratic uprising. The biennale's title, "10,000 Lives", was borrowed from a 30-voluime poem conceived by Korean author Ko Un during a two-year prison sentence for his participation in the 1980 uprising. In the Gwangju Biennale Hall's first gallery. one of eight venues, is Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovic's On the Barricades. 2010, a performance work that pays homage to the victims of the 1980 uprising, featuring several local volunteers humming a marching anthem sung during the revolts. The installation is an adaptation of her 2005 Rohrbach Living Memorial project. in which Ivekovic commemorated Roma citizens by re-enacting a photograph taken moments before their deportation to a concentration camp. Gallery three is given over to representations of heroes and martyrs. Useful Photography magazine has curated a collection of poster images featuring Palestinian Intifada fighters, suicide bombers and victims taken by Dutch photojournalist Ad van Denderen. His posters allude to a new form of rapidly produced propaganda by Palestinian activists that commemorated lives lost during the most recent Intifada. The victim's faces are intertwined with sacred imagery, including the golden dome of Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque. In the Gwangju Folk Museum, the second to last biennale venue, Korean artist Jung Lee presents Clubgenki, 2002, a photographic series of Asian women in a London club that markets itself as a destination where eastern and western cultures convene, or where European men could meet women from the Far East. Although initially a member of the club, Jung soon felt troubled by the nature of the conversation between the patrons. The dimly lit images capture these moments of frustration experienced by both Lee and the women photographed. Marisa Mazria Katz

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Author: Katz, Marisa Mazria Title: Western emphasis at South Korea's Gwangju Biennale Source: Art Newspaper 19 O 2010 p. 10 ISSN: 0960-6556 Publisher: Umberto Allemandi & Co. Publishing 70 South Lambeth Road, 3rd Floor, London SW8 1RL, United Kingdom

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