Haroon Mirza and Lucy Raven feature in 30th anniversary edition of the Gwangju Biennale
29 August 2024
'Spectres of Our Own Making: British Council–Korea Foundation Pavilion'
featuring Haroon Mirza
7 September – 1 December 2024
The British Council in Korea and the Korea Foundation will open a pavilion at the 15th Gwangju Biennale comprising works by British and Korean artists created through the UK–Korea Creative Commission for Climate Action, which ran for three years from 2021 to 2024. The artworks in 'Spectres of Our Own Making' tackle the theme of climate emergency by asking us to not only commune with ancestral ghosts, but to in a sense become spectres ourselves. We are encouraged to engage in our present moment to question, critique, queer and co-create ways to exist more equitably and with spiritual vigour, in a ruptured world that can otherwise incapacitate us.
Haroon Mirza presents a 2023 collaborative work with artist Helga Dorothea Fanon, The Ancients Call it Ataraxia. Continuing his ongoing ‘modular opera’ – a malleable system of interconnected video and performance works – this film installation depicts a tea ceremony conducted using the active ingredient of the amanita muscaria mushroom. The deliriant strain of mushroom is associated with toxicity, dizziness and loss of coordination, rather than with the hallucinations of the psylocibin or magic mushroom. Its red-and-white, domed cap has a rich history and mythology, both in popular folklore associated with the poisonous toadstool that shrinks Alice in Wonderland and in its ritual usage by Saami and Siberian shamans, as a healing aid or a portal to another universe.
Combining themes of childhood make believe and mystic soothsaying, Mirza’s immersive installation intermixes vocals by soprano Sarah-Jane Lewis, a two-channel film featuring ingestion of the tea by a group of children (the artist’s included) on the night of Winter Solstice, alongside two tabla drums beating out a shamanic rhythm, representing another of the modular elements borrowed from previous bodies of work.
'PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century'
featuring Lucy Raven
7 September – 1 December 2024
For its 30th anniversary, the 15th Gwangju Biennale gathers 72 artists from 30 countries in 'PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century', which attempts to map the complexity of the contemporary world.
In Korean, pansori literally translates to "the noise from the public place", as well as being a traditional Korean musical genre anchored in its native territory. This operatic exhibition explores the spaces we inhabit, from our housing to the human occupation of the planet. As landscapes are also soundscapes, the exhibition is built as a narrative connecting musical and visual forms, recreating the original spirit of PANSORI by presenting artists who explore contemporary space through dialogue with the living forms around them. Through seemingly dissimilar topics of conflictual borders, anti-migration structures, confinement, social distance, climate change and segregation policies, a commonality is found in the political organisation of space.
Lucy Raven's 2022 film installation Demolition of a Wall (Album 2) is a suite of short films observing the extreme pressure surging forth after the detonation of an explosive charge. Raven shot the film at an explosives range in Socorro, New Mexico, which has been physically imprinted with the history of atomic bomb testing and hypersonic weapons research. Raven purposefully omits the actual blasts and instead makes us look at what occurs in the immediate aftermath: shock waves traversing the landscape.
