Forum and Fellows

To All the Contributing Factors is a forum organized as part of the 11th Gwangju Biennale, titled The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?), discussing works by small- and medium-scale art organizations across the world with regards to questions of value, continuity, and scale, and imagining acts in common.

Roughly one hundred small- and medium-scale art organizations whose work makes important contributions to the art of today are invited as the Biennale Fellows. While being “appointed” Biennale Fellows, they simply go on doing the great work they are engaged with in their own contexts—placing art center-stage there—without being concretely involved with the biennale in Gwangju. Distinct from bigger-scale art organizations such as museums, art fairs, and biennales, these organizations often function as the research and development department of the art world, generating new ideas and shaping new curatorial and educational methods. Above all, they actively support artists to experiment and cultivate their practices and nurture contact and conflict zones around themselves, including neighbors and various practitioners from other fields.

Yet the significance of their works is not fully acknowledged in a wider art and social ecology, while their self-determined “marginal” or “minor” positions, as well as increasing precarity in the climate of austerity and various crises, are palpable. What if we “connect dots” through such a “molecular campaign” and manifest a critical mass to commit to these shared concerns?

The Forum together with the Fellows call for the gathering of all those who are interested in and working with art through such organizations. It is planned as a meeting ground where a large-scale event can be the occasion for exchange and debate among smaller agents, beyond biennial routines such as representation, promotion, and city branding. The Forum takes place from 2 to 4 September, after the preview of the 11th Gwangju Biennale Exhibition, and consists of public readings, lectures, workshops, and a plenary session. Sharing common issues from post-fossil aesthetics to parallel pedagogies; gentrification; labor point of view; new relation between machine, animal, and humans, and specific artistic agencies in them; exchanging and exploring common organizational concerns; and different working methods and tactics, a new multi-organizational field might take shape.

The Forum entitled To All the Contributing Factors, consists of three days of activities dedicated to questions of value, continuity, and scale through the lens of the art organizational practices of the so-called Biennale Fellows, around 100 small and mid-size “differential” art organizations from various parts of the world, and imagining acts in common. Representatives from about 80 of the Fellows will participate in the Forum.

The Forum will take place at several locations, including the Gwangju Biennale Hall, 518 Archives, Gwangju International Center, Mite-Ugro, Asia Culture Center and The New Centre for Research & Practice (online)

The first day takes place on the Biennale premises from 17:00 to 19:00 with readings, presentations, and lectures by guest speakers including Han Kang, novelist and the author of The Vegetarian and Human Acts, among many others; Fernando Garcia-Dory (GB11 artist) & Hu Fang, poet and co-founder of Vitamin Creative Space; Andrea Philips, art theorist and PARSE Professor of Art and Head of Research at the Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg; and Shin Ji Young, researcher and the author of Minority Commune.

The second day takes place in the form of workshops at several host locations in the city, each moderated by one of the Biennale Fellows. All Forum participants are directed to join smaller groups focusing on specific issues (each is capped at a maximum of 15 participants) and have a daylong discussion until we all gather for a plenary session to harvest the outcomes of each workshop. The list of issues and groups will be announced on the first day of the forum.

The third day will feature a mode of encounter and exchange popular in Korea—hiking in Mudeungsan National Park in Gwangju, which will be a two-hour walk, followed by visits to three private museums in the area, each of which are hosting parts of the GB11 exhibition, namely the commissions by Gunilla Klingberg, Bernd Krauss and Saskia Noor van Imhoff. The forum will conclude with an early evening neighborhood party, or Janchi, at the plaza in front of the Biennale Hall.

Curated by Binna Choi and Maria Lind.