The year 2020 marked a global shift in biennial scheduling, with major art festivals in Venice, Lyon, Liverpool, São Paulo, Sharjah, and Dakar all deferring their forthcoming exhibitions due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. Notwithstanding, a handful of biennial exhibitions opted to forge ahead during these trying times, most notably in South Korea, which hosted the Busan Biennale in September 2020 and the Gwangju Biennale in April 2021. While the former was a mostly straightforward affair, the latter unfolded a more diffuse presentation that necessitated assiduous unpacking of its intertwined concerns and positions. Under the artistic direction of curators Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala, the 13th Gwangju Biennale, “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning,” asserted an unabashed reproval of Western, anthropocentric, patriarchal, and scientific biases that inform prevailing paradigms of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption. To this end, the exhibition’s 69 participating artists presented works that substantiated the promises of heterogeneous and collective bodies of wisdom, evoking sensibilities of solidarity and empowerment through the convergence of intellectual and ethical impulses.

• Review
• Andy St. Louis