Gwangju Biennale at the Tate Modern | roundtable

ROUNDTABLE: The 9th Gwangju Biennale, described as an open-ended series of collaborations, will continue its evolving conversation with this talk chaired by Lorenzo Fusi, curator of the Biennial Exhibition at the 2012 Liverpool Biennial. The panel features four of the six Co-Artistic Directors of the 9th Gwangju Biennale - Sunjung Kim, Mami Kataoka, Carol Yinghua Lu, Nancy Adajania - and the President of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation, Dr. Yongwoo Lee. While it operates simultaneously on many levels, one thing is quite clear:ROUNDTABLE, the 9th Gwangju Biennale, is not about unanimity. ROUNDTABLE invites us to consider diverse forms of collectives within historic and contemporary contexts, the tension between belonging and anonymity, and the affects that temporality, spatiality and mobility have on the individual and the collective. Historically, the roundtable is associated with the political summit, where various agendas are brought together for group consideration. It could also evoke the traditional Korean image of the roundtable, the duriban, around which people eat communally. Beyond metaphor, ROUNDTABLE simultaneously describes the working relationship of the 2012 Gwangju Biennale’s six Co-Artistic Directors, the conversational interaction of its six sub-themes, and its non-linear structure. By design, these sub-themes circle around one another, overlapping, and at times taking oppositional views on the role of the individual or of the collective. The act of curation is thus a synthesis - a series of collisions that leads to transformation and cross-contamination. Curated by a team of six Co-Artistic Directors: Nancy Adajania, Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Mami Kataoka, Sunjung Kim, Carol Yinghua Lu, and Alia Swastika –ROUNDTABLE is expressed through six interrelated sub-themes: Logging In and Out of Collectivity / Re-visiting History / Transient Encounters / Intimacy, Autonomy and Anonymity / Back to the Individual Experience / Impact of Mobility on Space and Time. Lorenzo Fusi is curator of the 2012 Liverpool Biennial Exhibition, The Unexpected Guest, an exhibition of specially commissioned and pre-existing work across the city that explores notions of hospitality. Leading and emerging artists have been commissioned to make permanent and temporary public artworks as well as long-term community-based projects. The artists have been invited to question our ability to be ‘unprepared’. Can we afford to be hospitable in these critical times? Source: Tate