gudeul is a common space for reading and gathering. It is where programs and workshops take place and you can read the mook Masanmunhwa and other materials.
Exhibition view of gudeul (Seongsan Art Hall), 2024, Photo by studio SUJIKSUPYUNG (Cheolki Hong), Courtesy of Changwon Cultural Foundation · The 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale 2024
MOOK
silent apple: mook is at once an object and a surface for movement, circulating through the exploration of poetry, city, and sculpture as language that is the exhibition space of the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale. This year’s Biennale links the implicit language of poetry and sculpture to the eye of the viewer, proposing the construction of various “streets” and “gaps” across the strata of the city. As Changwon itself is being formed and restructured by transnational actor, the exhibition examines the meaning behind the sculptures inscribed on its surface while also making space for new sculptures as well. The accompanying publication, silent apple: mook, serves as both medium and guide to the story of Masan, Changwon, and Jinhae, alluding to the exhibition’s infiltration into the very temporality of the city. In terms of format, this publication falls somewhere between a book and a magazine — hence the name “mook,” here indicating a collection of poetry, fictions, scripts, drawings, photographs, reportage, essays, and more. First popularized in Korea in the 1980s, the mook marked a new chapter for regional cultural movements as a way to push back against the suppression of the press and the exclusivity and limitations of Seoul-based periodicals. Of these, the first regional mook published in this area, Masanmunhwa, offered a critique of the binary thinking and unilateral provincialism behind the split between Seoul and the provinces, emphasizing the fact that any region can be fertile ground for the formation of its own autonomous culture. These roots share real resonance with this year’s Biennale, which also seeks to reorganize the hierarchical relations between sculpture and city. In the first half of this publication, we have reprinted several previously published pieces, including the poem “A Well-Ripened Apple,” by the poet Kim Hyesoon, an autobiographical essay by a sculptor, labor literature that depicts a day in the life of a worker in the industrial complex, and a piece about boundary-making in history. The second half provides overviews and visitor information about the exhibition venues — Seongsan Art Hall, Seongsan Shell Mound, Changwon Cultural Complex Dongnam Ground, and Changwon City Masan Moonshin Art Museum. With this exhibition and mook as your vehicle, we invite you to join us in drawing a spiraling trajectory — much like the peel of an apple — from ground to sculpture, from sculptural language to poetic angle, and from poetry back to the surface, rewriting movement across the surface of the city.
Riku Iioka is a curator and writer based in Japan. He has been an Assistant Curator at the Yokohama Museum of Art since 2024. He explores the relationship between art practices and interdisciplinary theories under the concept of "diagram" and researches the possibility of curating in the Asian region from an inter-local perspective.
Gureum
Areum Woo is a writer and editor based primarily in Seoul. After studying literature and art theory, she has continued to write and edit. She is interested in exploring the connections between curatorial and editorial practices. In line with this interest, she is virtually running Gureum, a travel agency and publishing house, for this biennale.
* Dates of the program may change. Further information and registration will be announced over coming months.
* Inquiry :
changwonsbiennale@gmail.com
055-714-7652
** Please note that absent without prior notification, the registration for the future biennale programs can be restricted.
Bells performance
Aki Onda
guest performer: Park Jiha
Dates:
Friday, September 27, 2024
15:00 - 15:30
16:00 - 16:30
Seongsan Art Hall, 2F, 03
Aki Onda and Ji-ha Park present Bells performance, a live performance exploring the sound of silent sculptures.
Dates:
Friday, September 27, 2024 - Sunday, September 29, 2024
Friday, October 18, 2024 - Sunday, October 20, 2024
Thursday, November 07, 2024
Friday, November 08, 2024
Sunday, November 10, 2024
Jaeilyeogaeg is a travel program that uses conversation as a vehicle for travel, run by art critic and exhibition curator Yuki Konno. For the duration of the Biennale, the program will operate with Changwon as its destination. Participants, who live in Changwon or elsewhere, will meet Yuki Konno at an agreed upon starting point and travel to the Biennale exhibition site. Together, they will walk or use taxis, cars, trains, buses, and other transportation facilities to outline the city's various routes and facilities. When they arrive at their destination, they receive a gift and part ways.
Transfield Studio, comprised of artists Rick Yamakawa and Yuko Takeda, uses the medium of a touring performance, a map of said performance, and an audio guide to unpack the question: “How can we, gathered here, actually be together?” Having conducted fieldwork and research in Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, and elsewhere, Transfield Studio develops their Elevation series in cities that topographically resemble islands and peninsulas, where the land begins and ends at zero meters above sea level. Following Elevation, Separation(2024, Taipei) and Elevation, Flow(2024, Seoul), Elevation, Central(2024, Changwon) explains the geography of Changwon and Jinhae using the rotary, a key element of local road transportation. Visitors may access the audio guide via their own devices, imagining the distant past as they listen to the narrative of the city's boundaries at the Seongsan Shell Mound, which claims its own frozen time.
Tangerine Collective
Association: Yewon Seo, Minwoo Seo
Dates:
14:00-15:00, 16:00-17:00,
Tuesday, October 1, 2024
Venue:
Changwon Cultural Complex Dongnam Ground
Troll - The voice leaks out of house is a work that shakes up the space and time of the Dongnam Ground. Tangerine Collective appropriate the political action of the “seat change” — in which 1970s female factory workers chose to reject the seats they had been assigned as if by the hand of fate — and turn it into a choreographic strategy. This democratic politics of floating freely without occupying a specific place awakens our senses and perceptions through the materiality of the sounds that seem to emanate from the juniper trees of Dongnam Ground, from the steps of the podium, and from the gaps between the exhibited sculptures.
Dates:
14:00-16:00, Sunday, October 6, 2024
14:00-16:00, Sunday, October 13, 2024
14:00-16:00, Monday, October 14, 2024
Venue:
Seongsan Art Hall, 1F, gudeul
Ebb and Flow, an artist collective active in the field of art education, conducts a children's workshop that draws on the geography of Changwon, with the meeting of land and sea, and its character as an industrial city that connects past and present. Soul of Earth, Soul of Water was conceived by recalling the history of Changwon, including the excavation of the Seongsan Shell Mound in the 1970s, its neighboring ironworks, and the formation of the surrounding industrial complex, and then combining these elements with the major concepts that inform Areum Kim and Kaewoong Seo’s work, respectively. Participants imagine the history of the ironworks, which utilize fire to produce steel, together with the cycle of earth and water, those primordial substances, and work to express the spirit of these facets of nature.
Dates:
10:00-11:30, 14:00-15:30,
Saturday, October 19, 2024
14:00-15:30,
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Venue:
Seongsan Art Hall, B1
Ro kyung Ae begins her work by asking questions about simple and basic things like symbols, listening, combining and arranging. Both Hand-Well-Sculpture and short & Long are activities that involve physical play and expression with children. For the time allotted, children are encouraged to move their bodies in ways that feel different from simple physical exercises and to actively utilize their curiosity and imagination. Using art materials to think about length, the children explore the length of objects, the length of their bodies, the length of the space they are in, and all kinds of other lengths around them, discovering different modes of artistic expression, perception, and sensation along the way.
As an artists collective, Sarim153 retraces the timeline of events that led to their formation and the backdrop of events that took place around Changwon. ‘Galapagos tortoises’ are endemic to the Galapagos Islands and are not found on any other continent. Here, the specificity of Changwon's art ecosystem is compared to that of the Galapagos Islands, and the genesis of a certain global artist collective is unpacked by connecting it to the environment of the Galapagos. Furthermore, this piece also seeks to define the position and character of Sarim153 within a broader regional perspective.
This is a report on the results of the artist-led “critique” of Sarim 153 and a showcase of each involved artist's work. The members of Sarim 153 are themselves young artists who started their activities from wherever they happened to be at the time: namely, the regional sphere. Their various activities, intertwined with this mode of “critique,” are located mostly within the act and process of building a distinctive overall point of view as an artist rather than anchoring the meaning of this or that specific work. Thanks to the Biennale, what began as a response to the lack of writers in Changwon actually producing art texts has been reenergized in the form of artist-led “critiques.” Using this mutual “critique” as a tool, Sarim 153 attempts to share ‘image fragments' unique to each artist.
Dreams of Local and Contemporary
→ Apply(scheduled)
Sarim153
Dates:
15:00-17:30,
Saturday, November 9
Venue:
Seongsan Art Hall, 1F, gudeul
Young artists from Changwon, as well as other members of the local arts and culture communities will share their issues and experiences and hopefully establish some ties between Changown and non-Changwon regions. Kang Minhyung of Gwangju Barim, Yoo Woon of Incheon Temporary Space, Yoon Joohee of Seoul Contemporary, Park Sooyoung of Daegu Ri Sang Choon Institute of Contemporary Art, and Sarim 153 of Changwon will share events that have occurred or are occurring in their respective radius of activity, exploring the possibility of a multicentered regional network and wishing nothing but the best for the artists' collective.
* Inquiry :
changwonsbiennale@gmail.com
055-714-7652
** Please note that absent without prior notification, the registration for the future biennale programs can be restricted.
