Highlights from Gwangju Biennale 2018: “Imagined Borders,” Part 2
By HG Masters
Exterior view of the Asia Culture Centre in Gwangju, where portions of the 12th Gwangju Biennale were displayed. All photos by HG Masters for ArtAsiaPacific.
The portions of Gwangju Biennale 2018 housed at the Asia Culture Center (ACC) and offsite venues were almost sizable enough to constitute another biennial. It was also at these locations that the endeavors of “Imagined Borders” became increasingly uneven in form and content. The biennial was still on solid footing at the ACC with the dramatic presentation of Adrián Villar Rojas’s two-channel film installation, War of the Stars (2018), one of the designated GB Commission works. Villar Rojas has been working toward the project since he first did a residency in 2014 in Yangji-ri, a village in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) near the boundary with North Korea, and created installations there. In subsequent years, he made a film, The Most Beautiful Moment of War (2017), which looked at life in the village populated entirely by the elderly. That film appears in War of the Stars along with footage of people watching films at the Gwangju Cinema, in a film-within-film-within-installation layering of what the artist calls “an eternal project.”
