PAWEL ALTHAMER ANDRE DE DIENES TOM HOLERT

CARL ANDRE PHILIP-LORCA ARNOUD HOLLEMAN

ART ORIENTÉ OBJET DICORCIA CARSTEN HÖLLER
ANNA ARTAKER MIKE DISFARMER RONI HORN
TAUBA AUERBACH HAROLD EDGERTON TEHCHING HSIEH
MORTON BARTLETT WALKER EVANS HUANG YONG PING
THOMAS BAYRLE EYE GLASS SHOP HEUNGSOON IM
HANS BELLMER HARUN FAROCKI SANJA IVEKOVIĆ
E. J. BELLOCQ JEAN FAUTRIER JIKKEN KOBO /
NAYLAND BLAKE HANS-PETER FELDMANN EXPERIMENTAL
PETER FISCHLI & WORKSHOP
JONATHAN BOROFSKY
DAVID WEISS YASMINE KABIR
IRINA BOTEA
LEE FRIEDLANDER KAN XUAN
KERSTIN BRÄTSCH
KATHARINA FRITSCH BONGKYU KANG
GLENN BROWN
AURÉLIEN FROMENT JACOB KASSAY
JAMES LEE BYARS
PAUL FUSCO LEANDRO KATZ
DUNCAN CAMPBELL
CYPRIEN GAILLARD MIKE KELLEY
JAMES CASTLE
RUPPRECHT GEIGER EDWARD &
MAURIZIO CATTELAN NANCY REDDIN
FRANZ GERTSCH
JACQUES CHARLIER KIENHOLZ
HERMANN GLÖCKNER
HYEJEONG CHO HANYONG KIM
JEAN-LUC GODARD
BYUNGSOO CHOI SANGGIL KIM
GU DEXIN
KWANGHO CHOI KONRAD KLAPHECK
GUO FENGYI
ANNE COLLIER ALICE KOK
JOÃO MARIA GUSMÃO &
ROBERTO CUOGHI PEDRO PAIVA KOKDU (FROM THE
COLLECTION OF OCK
KEREN CYTTER YANGAH HAM RANG KIM)
JOHN DE ANDREA DUANE HANSON JEFF KOONS
BERLINDE DE YDESSA HENDELES TETSUMI KUDO
BRUYCKERE
THOMAS HIRSCHHORN
 CONTENTS 10000 LIVES

1 CURATOR’S INTRODUCTION 10,000 Lives, the 8th Gwangju Biennale presents a sprawling
investigation of the relationships that bind people to images and
images to people. With works by 134 artists—realized between 1901
7 BIENNALE HALL . GALLERY 1
and 2010, as well as several new commissions—the exhibition brings
35 BIENNALE HALL . GALLERY 2 together artworks and cultural artifacts to examine our obsession with
65 BIENNALE HALL . GALLERY 3 images.
85 BIENNALE HALL . GALLERY 4
126 BIENNALE HALL . GALLERY 5 Today we suffer from an acute form of iconophilia, a pathological
129 GWANGJU FOLK MUSEUM / FOLKLORE EDUCATION CENTER fascination with images. Billions of images are produced and consumed
139 GWANGJU MUSEUM OF ART every day: more than 500,000 images per second are uploaded to a
single website; Americans alone take an average of 550 snap shots per
152 YANGDONG TRADITIONAL MARKET PROJECT
second; by the age of forty, a person will have watched an average of
50,000 hours of television. We live in a world suffocated by images,
154 SPONSORS and yet we still seek comfort in them: we congregate around images,
155 LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION adore them and crave them. We consume images and destroy them,
156 VENUES carrying out wars in their name.
157 VISITOR INFORMATION
158 IMAGE CREDITS & PERMISSIONS The exhibition title is borrowed from Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives),
160 GWANGJU BIENNALE FOUNDATION / SPONSORS the 30 volume epic poem by Korean author Ko Un. Conceived while Ko
was in prison for his participation in the 1980 South Korean democratic
161 CREDITS
movement, Maninbo is composed of over 4,000 poems—portraits in
words describing every person Ko Un has ever met, including figures
from history and literature.

As with Maninbo, the exhibition unfolds as a gallery of portraits or as

a family album. Encompassing a diverse range of media, 10,000 Lives
presents a series of case studies that explore our love for images and
our need to create substitutes, effigies, and stands-in for ourselves
and our loved ones. 10,000 Lives tells the story of people through the
images they create and the images they leave behind, but it also follows
the lives of images themselves, tracing their endless metamorphoses,
from funerary statuary to commercial propaganda, from religious icon
to scientific tool, from a mirror of ourselves to a projection of our
desires.

Along with the work of contemporary artists, the exhibition includes

historical works, found photographs, and cultural artifacts that
exemplify the multifaceted existence of images, placing them within
a wider cultural context and, at times, blurring the line between

1
documents, relics, and art works. It is a biennial conceived as a
temporary museum—opening outwards to embrace history, the
exhibition cultivates the exercise of memory, wandering through more
than one hundred years of history.
In the BIENNALE HALL, five separate galleries branch off to reflect
themes recurring throughout the exhibition. The exhibition begins
in GALLERY 1, presenting works that deal with photographic
representation, posing, and the construction of the self through
images. From Mike Disfarmer’s penny-portraits to Sanggil Kim’s
records of online communities, and Heungsoon Im’s videos, in 10,000
Lives, people line up in front of the camera, ranked like tin soldiers or
pinned down like a gorgeous collection of butterflies. Celebrities and
illustrious nobodies appear in the photographs of Andre de Dienes,
Hanyong Kim, and Namhan Photo Studio, while Peter Fischli &
David Weiss align thousands of snap-shots on a light table twenty-
seven meters long, presenting reality in all its sublime banality. In the
paintings and drawings of Franz Gertsch, Maria Lassnig, and Jakub
Ziółkowski, faces and psychologies are dramatically revealed.
Filmmaker Wu Wenguang distributed video cameras to rural Chinese
workers and asked them to film their towns: the hundreds of hours
recorded by the farmers capture everyday life at the margins of the
Chinese empire, composing a choral encyclopedia. Swarming with
pictures, the exhibition becomes an image-making machine: Franco
Vaccari invites visitors to pose and photograph themselves using
a photo booth in the exhibition galleries. By manipulating historical
photographs, and with the collaboration of an army of volunteers,
Sanja Iveković creates a living memorial to the participants of the May
18 Gwangju Uprising of 1980.
In a world gorged on images, recycling, appropriation, and repetition
have become survival strategies that can assume a therapeutic
function. Anne Collier, Aurélien Froment, and Peter Roehr
appropriate and rearrange existing images. Sherrie Levine and
Sturtevant question ownership and copyright by replicating works by
other artists.
GALLERY 2 explores the mechanics of vision through optical illusions
and para-scientific imaginaries. Analyzing how visual experiences
are inscribed in our eyes and bodies, artists like Tauba Auerbach,
Thomas Bayrle, Bridget Riley, Paul Sharits, Stan VanDerBeek, and
Haegue Yang, raise questions about how images are constructed
2 3
and circulated. The experimental films of Jikken Kobo and Katsuhiro
Yamaguchi take the machine of vision apart: the act of seeing becomes
an adventure for the eyes, while in Artur Żmijewski’s new video, blind
people paint the world as they see it.
In other cases, images annex new territories to the domain of the
visible. Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic shots and Eliot Porter’s
naturalistic views are examples of scientific photography that have
radically reinvented the way we see things, mapping new physical and
aesthetic dimensions.
Exploring the technology of vision, many works in the exhibition
examine the ties—at times loving, at times violent—between cameras
and subjects. In Christopher Williams’s photographs, the apparatus of
vision is literally taken apart: lenses are cut open, cameras inspected
from each and every angle, to reveal the mechanics whereby images are
constructed. In the works of Harun Farocki, João Maria Gusmão &
Pedro Paiva, Carsten Höller, and Mark Leckey, one detects a concern
with the act of seeing, so much so that it has to be carefully analysed.
The reception and consumption of images represent a crucial
preoccupation for artists and image makers today. Hans-Peter
Feldmann, Shinro Ohtake, Seth Price, and many others, accumulate,
collect, and organize found images and fragments of visual culture. As
the line separating the production of images from their consumption
grows thinner, these artists look at how images are fabricated and
distributed through media.
GALLERY 3 brings together works that deal with the representation
of heroes and martyrs, exploring the ways images are used to create
myths, preserve the memory of victims, or bear witness to war and
oppression.
A key work in the visual lexicon of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the
Rent Collection Courtyard is a display of over 100 sculptures made to
educate the Chinese population about the abuses of the feudal system.
Created between 1965 and 1978 by students, artists, and faculty of
the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, the tableau illustrates the conflation of
art, politics and collective beliefs—the power of images to educate and
stir revolutions. It is presented in its entirety in the Biennale, and for
the first time ever in an Asian country outside China.
In their video biographies, Duncan Campbell, Leandro Katz, Liu Wei,
Rabih Mroué, and Hito Steyerl describe the moment in which a private
figure becomes a public image, a simplified but instantly recognizable
icon. The paintings of Jean Fautrier, the Intifada posters collected
by the magazine Useful Photography, and sculptures by Katharina
Fritsch and Thomas Hirschhorn analyze the iconography of martyrdom.
The funerary portrait of a young demonstrator, painted by Byungsoo
Choi, was once a focal point for throngs of mourners and now stands
as proof of the power of images to bring people together.
Some of the most complex images in this exhibition are the portraits
taken at Tuol Sleng, Security Prison 21 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia,
which preserve the memory of thousands of victims murdered by the Pol
Pot regime between 1975 and 1979. These photographs are some of
the most touching and ethically complex images in recent history: the
regime photographed each prisoner, knowing they would be sentenced
to death—the portraits now stand as the only survivors.
Can images save us? The idea that images have healing powers is
present in the work of Swiss clairvoyant Emma Kunz and Chinese
healer Guo Fengyi, who infused an almost desperate faith in images.
With their medicine drawings and therapeutic abstractions, they
created pictures that they hoped could save the world.
GALLERY 4 looks at religious figures and idols, fetishes and dolls.
The centerpiece is Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), a vast archive
of over 3000 photographs of people holding teddy bears, compiled by
the curator and collector Ydessa Hendeles. Her installation reveals
the viral power of images, their ability to propagate themselves, build
up mass and draw a following: images are choral phenomena with an
epidemic power. The Teddy Bear Project is thus also the history of a
craze: through thousands of images, Hendeles captures the expansion
and consolidation of a trend, an irrepressible desire to be just like
everyone else. The funerary Kokdu collected by Ock Rang Kim were used
in burial rituals to accompany the living and the dead. In both cases,
images are presented as children of nostalgia—we cling to them to ward
off loneliness.
Sometimes the love we invest in images proves to be too much. The love
of images often conceals a deep fear of them. Gestures of violence
and iconoclasm appear in the defaced photographs by E.J. Bellocq
from the early twentieth century and in Huang Yong Ping’s fractured
Buddha. Cyprien Galliard’s new video looks at Egyptian statuary and
4 5
its demise. In YangAh Ham’s video, actors adore an effigy made of
chocolate, while Harun Farocki documents processions and pilgrimages
to sacred statues.
Gallery 4 is also populated by life size polychrome sculptural works
by John De Andrea, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Duane Hanson,
Jeff Koons, Bruce Nauman, Oh Yoon, and others. Part-replicant,
part-idol, these hyper-realistic figures are brought together in a
Wunderkammer that resembles a mad scientist’s laboratory, a forge
in which to put together a new golem. Inspired by Mike Kelley’s now-
legendary 1993 exhibition titled The Uncanny, this section brings
together contemporary artworks, polychrome religious sculptures,
mannequins and dolls, medical instruments and stuffed animals. This
is an unauthorized, partial reconstruction and unannounced tribute to
Kelley’s extraordinary show, recreated from the few publicly available
photographs of the 1993 installation. Changes, variations, and
elements of creative reinterpretation were introduced, stretching the
borders of the original exhibition to include new artworks, as well as
artists and cultural objects from Asia.
GALLERY 5 strikes an irreverent tone, presenting idiosyncratic
perspectives on the structures of cinema and television. Taekyu Park
is the only remaining movie poster painter in Gwangju. His large hand-
painted standups of seminal films tell the history of Korean cinema. A
video installation by Zhou Xiaohu depicts a corporate office turned
upside down, in which workers are suspended from the ceiling in an
absurd situation that comically conflates contemporary capitalism with
inverted social values.
THE GWANGJU FOLK MUSEUM brings together works that address
the interaction of images and memory. Henrik Olesen charts a hidden
history of artists and artworks while Andro Wekua reconstructs,
entirely from memory, a personal record of his native town. Kwangho
Choi photographs his family’s happy memories but also records the end
of life, the deaths of elderly family members and the rites and rituals
that attend the grieving process. Alice Kok’s video messages reunite
families long-separated by international borders, vividly recording the
power of images to make the absent present.
THE GWANGJU MUSEUM OF ART focuses on self-portraiture and
images as projections of the self. Presenting disparate approaches to
autobiography, the self-generating surveillance machines of Dieter
Roth and Tehching Hseih demonstrate our irrepressible desire
to strike a pose, to stand in the footlights of the image, exposing
ourselves to the gaze of our fellow creatures.

In the works of Roni Horn, Cindy Sherman, and Ryan Trecartin, a new
sense of collectivity is introduced, which corresponds to a completely
renovated perception of the self. The characters that populate this SANGGIL KIM
exhibition seem both multiplied and consumed in a flood of images,
portraits, and masks. It is a gallery of faces whose proliferation runs
parallel to a process of attrition and disappearance: self-portraits from
ANNE MIKE
which the self seems to have been erased by a process of repetition. COLLIER DISFARMER
BRUCE
Seungtaek Lee’s monumental, double self-portrait suggests a divided NAUMAN
self, either that of the artist or of his nation. SANJA
IVEKOVIĆ
ANDRE
DE
Familial relationships are described and reconfigured in the works of DIENES
PAWEL
Roberto Cuoghi and Andy Warhol, while Morton Bartlett, who worked ALTHAMER
ARNOUD
outside the traditional confines of the art world, created private HOLLEMAN
universes in which fetish-like dolls were his closest friends. MIKE NAMHAN
KELLEY PHOTO
STUDIO

Throughout the exhibition, artworks, cultural artifacts, vernacular KONRAD

KLAPHECK
images, and everyday objects are displayed side by side. This cabinet E. J. BELLOCQ

of curiosities clearly manifests the obsession that has fueled our HEUNGSOON IM

figurative impulse for centuries, the desire to create images in our own CHRISTOPHER FRANZ GERTSCH
WILLIAMS
likeness. After all, the history of art—and the history of images—could
most simply be described as a history of people looking at people, of
eyes staring at bodies. LEE
FRANCO MARIA
FRIED-
VACCARI LASSNIG
LANDER

PETER FISCHLI &

Massimiliano Gioni DAVID WEISS

Artistic Director, Gwangju Biennale 2010 AURÉLIEN JAKUB

FROMENT ZIÓŁKOWSKI

WU WENGUANG

WALKER EVANS

SHERRIE LEVINE

MARK LECKEY
STURTEVANT

PETER ROEHR

6 BIENNALE HALL
7 . GALLERY 1
 SANGGIL KIM
(b. 1974 Gyeongsan, South Korea) Sanggil
Kim’s deadpan staged tableaux and
cool, dispassionate architectural views share a common thematic
interest in the character of twenty-first century urban life, particularly
in Seoul. Through both their formal rigor and lack of visible human
presence, Kim’s ongoing series of architectural photographs
documenting the upheavals in Asia’s endlessly protean metropolises
suggest a landscape constructed by a dispassionate alien hand.
Similarly, the early staged photographs from Kim’s Motion Picture
series speak to the effects of this alienating urban environment on
those who inhabit it, exuding a palpable sense of boredom and anomie.
In his most recent series, Offline Communities, Kim has brought
together individuals who share their passions for esoteric areas of
interest (The Sound of Music, Star Wars, Burberry plaid) in dedicated
forums on the Internet, and had them sit for a group portrait in the
real world. Often, the occasion of Kim’s portrait is the first time that
these individuals have met face-to-face, despite having formed close-
knit online communities over a period of months or even years. As such,
Kim’s project is both an attempt to visualize otherwise wholly virtual
communities, and to fashion the creation of an image into an occasion
for the alleviation of the alienation that haunts his earlier work. CW
off-line_alaska malamute internet community, 2005
C-print, 180 x 220 cm
8 9
BRUCE NAUMAN
Over the course of his career, Bruce Nauman has
(b. 1941 Fort Wayne, U.S.A.)
executed work in a wide variety of media. Often playful, ironic, or even
flippant, these stances cleverly belie Nauman’s serious engagement
with issues surrounding how the body occupies and moves through
space, the complex contingencies of language, and the traditionally
understood roles of the artist. To this end, Nauman has filmed himself
executing dance-like, self-imposed directives in his empty studio,
Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square, (1967-1968), created
a spiraling neon sign that declares, with ambiguous seriousness The
True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967), or
ambiguous sculptural works that address the human form, as in
10 Heads Circle/Up and Down (1990).
Poke in the Eye/Nose/Ear 3/8/94 Edit (1984) harkens back to an
earlier series of super slow motion videos Nauman made using an
industrial, 4000 frame-per-second camera in the late 1960s, in
which he manipulated his body in simple ways that were theatrically
exaggerated by the extreme slowness of the film’s playback. As the
title suggests, in this film Nauman pokes himself in the eye, nose, and
ear with his own finger. The actions would seem almost childish, as if
Nauman were exploring a body with which he is unfamiliar, but the slow
playback lends an air of foreboding deliberateness and violence, as
Nauman repeatedly pokes himself in the eye, implying an attempt to
stop the flow of images—destroying the senses and inducing a state
of blindness. CW
Poke in the Eye/Nose/Ear 3/8/94 Edit, 1994
Video, 52:00
 SANJA IVEKOVIĆ
Sanja Iveković’s work examines and critiques the
(b. 1949 Zagreb, Croatia)
structuring forces of visual culture and mass media, particularity as
they relate to the representation of gender and politics. Much of her
work is composed of appropriated materials that Iveković repurposes
and recontextualizes in order to expose their ideological functions.
Iveković is known for her performance work and her engagement with
the form of the public monument. In The Rohrbach Living Memorial
(2005) she created a temporary, performative monument to the Roma
victims of the Holocaust, for whom no permanent monument has yet
been erected. Based on a photograph of a group of Roma taken as
they were waiting to be transported to a concentration camp, Iveković
restaged this tableau by asking the residents of the Austrian city of
Rohrbach to perform the “living memorial” by reenacting the scene
from the early morning hours until noon. For the Biennale, Iveković
has developed a new version of her living memorial to commemorate
the victims of the Gwangju People’s Uprising of May 18, 1980. On the
Barricades is a memorial enacted by volunteers who stand in place of
statues representing the victims, humming a song that was a marching
anthem during the uprisings. Nearby, a slideshow of 545 photographic
portraits collected from family members of the victims will be presented
on 10 monitors. Iveković has performed a small violation of the
iconography of portraiture, closing the sitters’ eyes to signal that the
victims have found their final rest. CW
On the Barricades, 2010
Digital photographs/performance
10
MIKE DISFARMER
Born to a family of German immigrants
(b. 1884; d. 1959 Heber Springs, U.S.A.)
in rural Arkansas in the early 1880s, Mike Disfarmer took pains to
distance himself from his roots. Though his given name was Michael
Meyers, a surname that means “dairy farmer,” he changed it to
Disfarmer in 1939 in an attempt to set himself apart from his farming
family. Sometime in the 1930s, Disfarmer taught himself photography
and set up a studio in the back of his mother’s house in the small rural
town of Heber Springs, Arkansas where he set to work perfecting his
technique. Disfarmer later established a portrait studio on the town’s
Main Street, where he worked as a full-time “penny portrait” photo-
grapher, using a cumbersome and antiquated glass plate camera.
Disfarmer’s portrait studio soon became the town’s central attraction.
From the mid-1930s until the late 1940s, Disfarmer documented large
swaths of the town’s population, creating images that occupy a strange
middle ground between the starkly typological and the empathetic.
Almost four thousand glass plate negatives were rescued from
Disfarmer’s studio after his death in 1959, but none saw the light of
day until 1973, when they were brought to the attention of Julia Scully,
an editor at Modern Photography magazine. In 1979, Scully published a
book of Disfarmer’s work, and his pictures were immediately recognized
as a remarkable addition to the history of photographic portraiture.
Taken as a whole, Disfarmer’s portraits convey a sense of community
while celebrating the subjects’ individuality—they are a kind of family
album that forms a unique record of a time and place that would have
otherwise been overlooked. CW
Untitled, ca. 1940-1945
Gelatin silver prints, 14 x 9 cm
11
 ANNE COLLIER
Anne Collier’s studio photographs engage directly
(b. 1970 Los Angeles, U.S.A.)
with processes of image making and photographic seeing. Often re-
photographing images from books or record covers, Collier draws
attention to the artifice of the image, particularly as it relates to its
physical support and to her appropriative strategies. Developing Tray
#2 (2009) presents a photographic print of Collier’s own eye as it sits
in a photographic developing tray. This self-reflexive image creates a
conceptual feedback loop that is characteristic of Collier’s work: we
are looking at an image that is about looking, which could have been
made using the same darkroom equipment it depicts.
In the slide installation Woman With A Camera (35 mm) (2009), Collier
inflects her visual investigations with fraught psychological content,
engaging not only with the mechanics of vision and representation, but
also their operations in the world. Taken from a scene in the 1978 film
The Eyes of Laura Mars, the individual slides present a tightly framed
shot of the actress Faye Dunaway as she peers through the viewfinder
of a camera, her eyes widening in surprise and horror at what she sees.
Addressing the act of seeing, the potential violence implicit in the
gaze, and the possible power of representation to spill over into reality,
Woman With A Camera, like much of Collier’s work, is concerned more
with the processes and power relations inherent in image making than
with the choice of photographic subject. CW
Woman with a Camera (35mm), 2009
Slide projection
12
ARNOUD HOLLEMAN
(b. 1964 Haarlem, Holland) As
an artist and writer, Arnoud Holleman’s
extraordinarily diverse output is connected by a strong thematic
concern with the life and significance of images. Often this concern is
manifested through acts of appropriation that transform an image’s
meaning through a shift in context, or a removal of contextual
elements. This concern with the lives of images has also led him to
create works that explore the historical prohibitions on image making.
One such work is Untitled (Staphorst) (2003), a slowed-down loop
of 1960s film footage of the fundamentalist Protestant enclave of
Staphorst in the Netherlands. In the film, the village’s inhabitants are
seen shielding their faces from the camera. Their actions bring to mind
the superstition that photographic image making devices can steal a
part of one’s soul or life essence, but it is more likely that these pious
villagers are simply taking the Bible’s second commandment to a logical
extreme. Not content to simply abstain from the creation of unholy
images themselves, they hope to avoid the transformation of their
bodies into images at the hands of the camera operator, of becoming
idols by proxy. But Holleman’s principle interest in the footage is
cultural, not religious, and it is telling that the villagers’ gestures seem
so foreign to most viewers. Holleman notes that contemporary culture
has inverted religious bans on imagery; “to see and be seen via the
image has become a cultural and existential duty.” CW
Untitled (Staphorst), 2002
Video, 4:30
13
 ANDRE DE DIENES
(b. 1913 Turia, Romania; d. 1985, U.S.A.) As
a young man, Andre De Dienes spent
several years traveling around Europe before settling briefly in Tunisia,
where he bought his first camera. In 1933, De Dienes traveled to Paris
and worked for a period as a photographer with the Associated Press.
Encouraged by the famed couturier Edward Molyneux to become a
fashion photographer, De Dienes found success in the industry and
with the help of an editor at Esquire magazine, immigrated to America
in 1938, working for numerous high-fashion magazines in New York.
In 1944, De Dienes moved to Hollywood, where he hired nineteen-year-
old Marilyn Monroe, then Norma Jeane Baker, for her first modeling
job. Soon after, they took a five-week road trip together around
California and the American Southwest. Pictures from this trip landed
on the covers of magazines around the world, and were instrumental
in launching Monroe’s career. In Marilyn Shows What Death Looks Like
(1946), De Dienes photographed Monroe with a blanket draped over
her head and torso, holding her hands up to her face in a playful, peek-
a-boo-like pose. In the photograph, this simple act of disappearance
takes on an ominous feel, one that is made all the more poignant in
light of Monroe’s untimely death. But rather than disappearing from
the world of the visible, Monroe’s celebrity has ensured that she will
live forever as an image. CW
Untitled (Marilyn Shows What Death Looks Like),
1946/2010
Gelatin silver print, 35 x 27 cm
14
NAMHAN PHOTO STUDIO
(PORTRAIT OF PRINCESS PARK CHANJOO, b. 1914, d. 1995, Seoul, South Korea) Princess
Park
Chanjoo was born in Seoul in 1914. The granddaughter of a well-known
politician, Park attended the prestigious Kyung-gi Women’s High School
and later married Lee Woo, the fourth head of the Unhyeon Palace and
a member of the Imperial family of Korea. Park and Lee were married
in Japan, where Lee had been relocated by the Japanese government
as part of the process of Japanese education that was forced on all
members of the Imperial family. They had two sons, Lee Chung and Lee
Jung, before Lee was forced to relocate to Hiroshima for compulsory
service in the Japanese Army, where he was killed in the atomic bomb
blast in 1945. After her husband’s death, Park returned to Korea,
living at one of the Imperial family’s palaces in Seoul that she managed
to retain despite the Korean government’s appropriation of almost all
former Imperial properties after the end of Japanese occupation in
September 1945. Park died in 1995 in her private residence in Seoul,
where she had lived after her palace was sold, in 1992.
The photograph of Princess Park that is included in the Biennale
shows the future princess as a toddler, holding a small doll. Too young
to stand on her own, the child’s body is supported by the hand of a
figure otherwise concealed off-camera. This intervention—necessary
to keep the young Park from moving during the photographer’s lengthy
exposure while still showing her in an individual, noble portrait—gives
the picture a feeling of both tenderness and threat. Girding her waist
and assisting the young child to pose, the protective gesture of this
disembodied hand extends to both girl and doll, while the young Park
unknowingly mirrors this gesture as she clutches the doll to her chest.
CW
Photo of Princess Park Chanjoo
in her Infancy, ca. 1915
Photograph, 16 x 12 cm
15
 PAWEL ALTHAMER
(b. 1967 Warsaw, Poland) Pawel
Althamer’s sculptures, videos, and
performances explore the fragility and contingency of the body—often
his own—within the wider sphere of social and political contexts. He
has often submitted his body to extreme states, either physically or
psychically. In one early performance work, Althamer sealed himself
inside a body-sized plastic bag that slowly filled with cold water
(Water, Space, Time, 1991), in another, with the help of hypnosis and
hallucinogenic drugs, he explored the inner landscape of his mind (The
So Called Waves and Other Phenomena of the Mind, 2003-2004).
His sculptures engage with the body less directly, often through the
logic of substitution. His human-scale sculptures, representing himself
or members of his family, are constructed from hair, straw, intestine,
and cloth—visceral, rough-hewn materials that seem poised on the
threshold between embodiment and decay. For the Biennale, Althamer
has created a new version of Auguste Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais,
entitled Brodno People, made with the help of people from a working
class neighborhood of Warsaw. Rodin’s sculpture tells the story
of six leading citizens of the town of Calais, France, who, in 1347,
volunteered themselves as hostages to King Edward III of England in
exchange for lifting an eleven-month siege on their city during the
Hundred Years War. Althamer’s version emphasizes the social and
political circumstances of the work’s production by foregrounding
collective practice over individual authorship. Like totems or idols from
a personal religion, his figures appear almost as placeholders for the
artist’s body and those of his loved ones, as if their presence might
somehow ward off the inevitable decay of the flesh. CW
Self-portrait, 1993
Mixed media, grass, hemp fiber, animal intestine, wax, and hair
189 x 76 x 70 cm
16
MIKE KELLEY
Mike Kelley’s vast output over the past three
(b. 1954 Detroit, U.S.A.)
decades has taken myriad forms, chiefly video, performance, painting,
and photography. He explores the grotesque and fantastic elements
lurking within the popular consciousness, drawing on everything
from the youthful drama of high-school yearbooks to popular films,
cabaret performances, and the legacies of Pop art to produce dizzying,
overwhelming installations.
Rose Hobart II is a sculpture that essentially depicts one of the
artist’s earlier sculptures, A Continuous Screening of Bob Clark’s
Film “Porky’s”, 1981, the Soundtrack of which has been replaced
with Morton Subotnik’s Electronic Composition “The Wild Bull,” and
Presented in the Secret Sub-Basement of the Gymnasium Locker Room
(2002). A floor sculpture of peculiar geometry, painted black and
emanating an audio track from The Wild Bull by Morton Subotnik, Rose
Hobart II draws further connections between Thomas Edison’s Black
Maria movie studio and the system of progressive revelation in Plato’s
cave metaphor. The piece invites viewers to crawl inside via its low
entry points, upon which they encounter a looping video of the famed
nude shower scene from the film Porky’s, slowed down and manipulated
to stress the film’s highly-wrought acting. Entering Kelley’s piece
on hands and knees, viewers mime the voyeuristic behavior of the
characters in the film who crawl beneath the floor of the women’s
shower room for an illicit view. BT
Rose Hobart II, 2006
Wood, metal, carpet, acrylic paint, and video projection, 183 x 452 x 609 cm
17
 E. J. BELLOCQ
The life of photographer Ernest J. Bellocq is
(b. 1873, d. 1949 New Orleans, U.S.A.)
shrouded in rumor. Conflicting reports describe him as a curmudgeonly
eccentric semi-dwarf and as a dandy from an aristocratic Creole family.
Whatever the case, Bellocq is now remembered as the compassionate
documentarian who photographed the prostitutes of New Orleans’s
Storyville district, where prostitution was locally legalized from 1898 to
1917. But it was not until after his death that his photographic negatives
were discovered, hidden in a drawer of his desk and subsequently
purchased and printed by the photographer Lee Friedlander.
Bellocq’s portraits are marked by a startling intimacy that has fueled
the fires of speculation surrounding his relationship with his subjects
and spawned a number of fictional imaginings of his life. Beyond the
photographs’ candor—which reveals an intimate and playful relationship
with his subjects—what is most striking is that several of the glass-
plate negatives have violent scratches over the subjects’ faces, leaving
black voids in the resulting prints. The cause of this act of iconoclasm
is unknown: they may have been defaced by Bellocq himself, either in
a fit of jealous anger, or to protect the privacy of his sitters, or by his
ashamed brother (a Jesuit priest), or even by one of his sitters. The
details are lost to history—what remains are variously tender, erotic,
mysterious and disturbing documents. CW
Storyville Portrait, ca. 1912
Gelatin silver print on gold toned printing out
paper, 19 x 23 cm
18
FRANZ GERTSCH
Franz Gertsch is known for his monumental,
(b. 1930 Mörigen, Switzerland)
hyper-realist paintings and woodcuts of his friends, family, and the
landscape around his native Switzerland. Derived from photographs
that Gertsch enlarges onto canvas, his paintings mix the casual feeling
of snapshots with the rigorous precision of old master paintings. In his
earlier works, which mostly depict Gertsch’s bohemian friends posed in
casual tableaux, the meticulous attention to detail and the grand scale
of the canvases have an ennobling effect on his subjects, creating
ramshackle icons of the punk milieu. But the transformative property
of Gertsch’s paintings also works the other way, as in his well-known
series of portraits of punk icon Patti Smith, which have an intimate,
incidental quality that belies Smith’s towering presence as a musician.
In Self-portrait (1980), Gertsch turns inward, rendering his own
likeness in unflinchingly detail. Illuminated by a camera flash that
throws a harsh shadow on the wall behind him, Gertsch’s enigmatic
expression is both pensive and apprehensive, as if caught off guard.
With its mixture of monumental scale and incidental detail, Gertsch’s
self-portrait seems to be an acknowledgment of the tension between
the painted image’s claim to immortality, and its subject’s inevitable
disappearance. CW
Self-portrait, 1980
Acrylic on unprimed canvas, 257 x 391 cm
19
 CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS
Christopher Williams repurposes the formal
(b. 1956 Los Angeles, U.S.A.)
vocabulary of commercial product photography to reflect on the
industrial production of images. In his images, an object (or group of
objects) is placed squarely in the middle of the frame on an evenly lit,
white backdrop, as though announcing nothing more than its existence.
His images of diverse consumer objects (candy bars, cameras, bicycles,
automobile tires) come with lengthy explanatory titles, listing seemingly
superfluous details (technical specifications, component parts, site of
manufacture) for each object. Designed to inundate the viewer with the
overwhelming complexity of industrial production, the captions provide
clues to their wider interrelation: the shared industrial processes,
economic conditions, and systems of distribution underlying almost
everything in today’s globalized society.
Williams’s photographs engage with the technology of commercial
photography and the obscure industrial systems of which it is a part,
addressing the gap between the visible world and the network of
invisible relationships that produce it. In his series of camera lenses
and cutaway models of photographic equipment, Williams lays bare
the photographic apparatus itself, leading us to question the very
structures underlying his work’s seeming self-evidence. CW
Cutaway model Switar 25mm f1.4 AR. Glass, wood and brass. Douglas M. Parker
Studio, Glendale, California, November, 17, 2007-November 30, 2007, 2008
C-print, 85 x 95 x 4 cm
20
KONRAD KLAPHECK
The son of an art historian dismissed from his
(b. 1935 Dusseldorf, Germany)
teaching post by the Nazis in 1934, the painter Konrad Klapheck grew
up in the shadow of the war. In high school around the early 1950s, he
discovered painting and modern literature, and was influenced early on
by Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. In 1961, Klapheck was introduced
to André Breton and his circle of French Surrealists, and the following
year made the acquaintance of René Magritte; both proved decisive
influences on his work.
Klapheck cultivated an idiom of close observation of modern,
mechanized objects, rendered with some outsized emotional, or
obliquely narrative, quotient that anthropomorphized or psychologically
accentuated these machines or industrial objects. Keys, faucets,
typewriters, or telephones, rendered in a smooth, stylized realism, in
vivid and pastel colors on flat backgrounds, came to stand in for the
absent narrative actors. The objects seem alive within their own realm,
pulsing and swollen with emotion. Deceptively laced with Freudian
symbolism, the works’ titles lead the viewer to far-off, frequently
psycho-associative readings of the work, as in Motherly Girlfriend, the
1966 painting of a curved, sloping bathtub spout, gleaming in dark
chrome. In his later portraits, rounded, simplified people live among and
activate these mechanic shapes while the objects take on human form,
each animating the presence of the other in a bout of discomfiting
surrealist perplexity. BT
Motherly Girlfriend, 1966
Oil on canvas, 70 x 88 cm
21
 FRANCO VACCARI
In 1972, Franco Vaccari set up a photo booth at
(b. 1936 Modena, Italy)
the Venice Biennale as part of a work entitled Leave On The Walls A
Photographic Trace Of Your Fleeting Visit, (1972). Over five thousand
visitors complied with the work’s directive; having their pictures taken
in the photo booth and affixing the resultant strip of photographs to
the wall. As the exhibition progressed, however, Vaccari ran into some
trouble with the Venetian police, who were concerned about some of
the activity going on behind the photo booth’s floor-length curtain.
In order to curtail what they believed to be inappropriate behavior, the
police took scissors to the curtain, shortening it to a more revealing
length.
For the Biennale, Vaccari has been invited to restage this work, which
is a kind of image-generating machine that creates a visual history
of its use and of the show itself, but which also relies entirely on the
participation of the viewing public and their willingness to donate
an image to the gallery walls. In this regard, the work can be seen as
precursor to the relational artworks of the 1990s, which focused on
creating works that remained incomplete without the direct engagement
of the viewer. Within the context of contemporary culture, the work
takes on a new set of associations in light of social networking and
photo-sharing websites, where users voluntarily share their images
with a wide audience on an almost daily basis—a cultural development
that would no doubt have been foreign to viewers in the early 1970s,
but which is now a prominent aspect of our image-saturated media
environment. CW
Leave On The Walls A Photographic Trace Of Your
Fleeting Visit, 1972
Exhibition in Real Time with Photomatic Kiosk
22
MARIA LASSNIG
Over the past six decades, the Austrian painter
(b. 1919 Carinthia, Austria)
Maria Lassnig has produced a body of work of deep psychic complexity
around the space of the human body. Her self-portraits are brutally
frank and, as with her images of others, verge on the grotesque.
Lassnig’s notion of “body awareness painting” dictates that she only
depict those parts of herself that she can truly sense while painting,
resulting in figures with deformed, limbless edges and haunted,
grimaced expressions. Lassnig’s method allows her to know herself
through the act of painting.
Lassnig employs a flat pictorial style, with garish, if sometimes muted,
colors against solid backgrounds, often with only the sparest of
contextualizing elements. The images are base and visceral: characters
confront their material being and their flawed behavior at the same
time, resulting in corpulent, malleable bodies attacking one another,
crushing small objects in their hands, or being preyed upon by cruel
circumstances. In her early eighties, after decades of avoidance (and
engaging in painting’s rivalry with the camera), Lassnig began using
photography to help her paint, cautiously engaging in its intrinsic
illusionism. These recent works have had more recognizable pictorial
space and context, but no less psychological charge. Through positions
and orientation of the figure, gesture, or gaze, Lassnig’s works often
address the viewer directly, who is implicated as a key to deciphering
meaning. Though sharing in the psychologically dense Viennese
genealogy of expressionism, Lassnig’s images also partake of a more
phenomenological tactic, where the act of her representation is the
continued deciphering of that very thing. BT
Language Grid, 1999
Oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm
23
 JAKUB ZIÓŁKOWSKI
(b. 1980 Zamość, Poland) Jakub
Ziółkowski’s phantasmagorical drawings
roil with mutant life: plants sprout giant eyeballs, patchwork bodies
threaten to slough off their skins or tumble into piles of dismembered
parts, internal organs make their way outside, objects grow hair, faces
distort as if infected with some unspeakable virus. In Ziółkowski’s
world, the body is always in peril and nature is always a threat. Mixing
the tortured physiologies of expressionism with fantastical menageries
that seemed pulled from the works of the early Dutch painter
Hieronymus Bosch, Ziółkowski has created a nightmare landscape all
his own.
In History of the Eye (2010), created for the Biennale, Ziółkowski has
interpreted Georges Bataille’s controversial short pornographic novel,
Story of the Eye (1928). First published under a pseudonym and not
publicly attributed to Bataille until after his death, the book presents
the depraved sexual exploits of two teenagers in a series of surreal
vignettes, which are often fetishistically focused on disembodied
eyes. These “eyes” are often tortured or demolished during the act
of base bodily pursuits, actions that reflect assertions in Bataille’s
philosophical works that the bodily should take precedence over vision.
Ziółkowski, with his focus on the corruptibility of the flesh and the
base realities of embodiment, seems a fitting illustrator of this tale,
which has become one of the most notorious works of philosophical
obscenity since the Marquis de Sade. Equating the act of seeing with
desire itself, the violence enacted in Ziółkowski’s History can be seen
as an attack of pornographic and forbidden images against all forms of
censorship. CW
History of the Eye, 2010
Oil on paper, dimensions variable
24
PETER FISCHLI & DAVID WEISS
(b. 1952 Zurich, Switzerland; b. 1946 Zurich, Switzerland) Peter
Fischli and David Weiss
have worked together collaboratively since 1979. In that time, they
have produced a distinctly playful oeuvre, working in a range of media
including photography, video, sculpture, installation, and performance.
Their work is marked by an interest in the transformation of everyday
objects and situations into ones that evoke a childlike sense of
mischief. They have created whimsical, strangely poignant arrangements
of kitchen utensils and various edibles balanced precariously on one
another (Equilibres—A Quiet Afternoon, 1984-1985), transformed
their studio into the site of a single, epic chain reaction (The Way
Things Go, 1987), and carved and painted meticulous reproductions of
everyday objects using polyurethane (Floss (Raft), 1982).
In Visible World (1986-2001), Fischli and Weiss have culled three
thousand images taken over the course of almost twenty years of
traveling and sightseeing. They are familiar images, anodyne almost
to the point of anonymity: images of airports, mountains, flowers, and
sunsets. It may seem strange that they bothered to take these pictures
at all, since there are so many just like them, ready to be appropriated.
But their status as personal travel photographs imbues the images
with the kind of affection reserved for souvenirs—they are objects
that remind us of our existence in a certain place, for a certain time.
Seen in this light, these banal images reveal themselves in all their
complexity: both individual records of journeys taken and products of
a collective visual understanding, they represent an unexpected fusion
of the personal and the universal. CW
Visible World, 1986-2001 (installation view)
Light table with 3000 photographs,
83 x 2805 x 69 cm
25
 PETER ROEHR
(b. 1944 Frankfurt, Germany; d. 1968) The
German artist Peter Roehr produced
a radically innovative oeuvre of film, sound, and works on paper in
his sadly brief career. Making text blocks consisting entirely of the
letters M or N, or the left parenthesis sign, Roehr hijacked the typing
keyboard, forming small spaces of internal infinity that were, at the
time, misread as concrete poetry, but should be seen as pushing into
new realms of abstraction and minimalism. His austere, obsessive film
loops operate in a similar manner, repurposing the imagery of popular
advertising and media into short, bluntly reiterative meditations,
presaging many contemporary currents of artistic production. Roehr’s
tactics were seriality and endlessness. As he said of his practice:
“Neither successive nor additive, there is no result or sum.”
Roehr’s film work drew from the pool of popular advertising and
television: shampoo commercials, wrestlers, and automobiles driving on
highways. Extracting small sections of these anonymous, commercial
films at key narrative moments, he sutured them into loops, forcing
them to endlessly recur, which changed and charged their visual and
auditory meaning. Latent characteristics emerge through the hypnotic
interrogation of form and sign: images take on new scales, marginal
details become central, emotions and expectations are frustrated. The
repetition plays tricks on the mind: at each new start, we are willing to
suspend our disbelief and brace for the possibility that the narrative
will progress this time, as when a skipping record magically restores
itself without intervention. Of course, that never happens here: time is
stuck in neutral. The reorganization of otherwise untouched sources
becomes, in Roehr’s hands, a truly transformational gesture. BT
Film-Montagen I-III, 1965
26
WALKER EVANS
(b. 1903 St. Louis, U.S.A.; d. 1975 Old Lyme, U.S.A.) Though
he is now remembered
as one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century,
Walker Evans initially aspired to be a writer. In 1926, after dropping out
of Williams College and taking odd jobs in New York City, he moved to
Paris in an attempt to gain entry into the city’s vibrant literary scene.
After one year in Paris, he returned to New York, where he befriended
a group of literary luminaries, among them Hart Crane and Lincoln
Kirstein. In 1928, Evans took up photography and quickly made a name
for himself as a photographer. His first published photographs, taken of
the Brooklyn Bridge, graced the cover of Crane’s seminal collection of
poems, The Bridge (1930).
In 1935, Evans was contracted by the United States government to
make photographs in connection with the efforts of the Resettlement
Administration (RA), which soon became the Farm Security Administration
(FSA). Evans’s unsentimental images of rural life during the Great
Depression, made under the FSA’s auspices, led writer James Agee
to select him for an assignment for Fortune magazine about three
sharecropping families in Alabama, for which Evans would make some of
his most famous photographs. Over the course of three weeks, Evans
and Agee assiduously documented the bleak lives of their subjects,
with Evans capturing the spare interiors of their homes and their looks
of determination and desperation. The story was ultimately rejected by
Fortune, but Evans and Agee went on to publish their work as a book
entitled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which has since become one
of the most enduring documents of the era. As Evans was still working
under the aegis of the FSA when he produced these images, they now
form part of the prints and photographs collection at The Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C., which houses more than fourteen million
other images. CW
Negro Church, South Carolina, 1936
Gelatin silver print, 20 x 25 cm
27
 SHERRIE LEVINE
(b. 1947 Hazleton, U.S.A.) Sherrie
Levine first came to prominence with
Douglas Crimp’s influential 1977 exhibition Pictures at Artists Space
Gallery in New York. In the show, Crimp identified a new generation
of artists—later dubbed the Pictures Generation—who were using
innovative strategies of appropriation to comment on various aspects
of existing visual culture. Levine is probably best known for her series
After Walker Evans (1981), in which she re-photographed Walker
Evans’s iconic, Depression-Era photographs of Alabaman tenant
farmers, presenting the appropriated images as her own. Though the
series was controversial when it was first shown, it has since become
emblematic of these new appropriative strategies.
Levine’s reproductive gesture is not just a simple act of artistic
plagiarism. Rather, by re-presenting Evans’s work and adding her own
authorship as an addendum, Levine enacts a subtle and sophisticated
shift in the work’s meaning, opening it up to new interpretations. Her
gesture can be read as a feminist undermining of one of photography’s
most revered patriarchs, a critique of the practice of anointing
documentary photography as art, and as Postmodern critique of
Modernist notions of originality and artistic autonomy. Whatever the
interpretation, Levine’s treatment of these photographs succeeded
in giving the images a new life that extended beyond Evans’s original
intentions, and the set of meaning that were ascribed to them in
their time. For the Biennale, Levine’s reproductions will be exhibited
alongside new prints from Walker Evans’s original negatives from the
Library of Congress, to further point towards their ambiguous status
as copied originals. CW
After Walker Evans, 1981
Gelatin silver print, 20 x 25 cm
28
STURTEVANT
(b. 1930 Lakewood, U.S.A.) Elaine
Sturtevant, who creates artwork under the
moniker Sturtevant, has spent her career producing what appear to be
exact copies of other artists’ works. Sturtevant masters the techniques
used by the artists whose work she reproduces (printmaking, painting,
sculpture, and photography) and engages in a kind of re-performance
of the original’s production, creating a new set of meanings in the
process. Since the 1960s, Sturtevant has produced facsimiles of iconic
works by Felix Gonzales-Torres, Roy Lichtenstein, Marcel Duchamp,
Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and others, often before the artists or
their works entered into the art historical canon. Her conceptual
strategy worked to stretch the Duchampian idea of appropriation to
its rational conclusion, calling into question Modernist notions of
originality and artistic genius.
For her series of Andy Warhol’s Flowers, Sturtevant obtained the
original silk screens from Warhol himself. Her Flowers would seem
indistinguishable from Warhol’s in both their appearance and their
production, as Warhol’s studio assistants often produced the silk
screens without his intervention. However, the fact that Sturtevant,
and not one of Warhol’s assistants, produced these Flowers
fundamentally changes their status as objects. Never simply copies,
Sturtevant’s works could be termed unoriginal originals, creating
new meaning by placing old forms into new contexts. In this way, they
share a conceptual affinity with contemporary “knock-off” culture,
which similarly raids the storehouse of the past, copying and hijacking
“original” works to create new ones. CW
Warhol Flowers, 1990
Silkscreen, acrylic on canvas, 305 x 305 cm
29
 AURÉLIEN FROMENT
(b. 1976 Angers, France) Aurélien
Froment’s work engages with the processes
of memory and learning, often through the use of games, puzzles,
and other forms of interactive mediums to address the evocative and
associative powers of images. A key influence for Froment is the work
of German educator Friedrich Froebel (inventor of the kindergarten)
who famously promoted the intersection of learning and play as a
pedagogical strategy. In the video Théâtre de poche (2007) a magician
conjures an array of disjointed images, which he proceeds to arrange
in the air around him, as if on an invisible screen. The work calls to
mind the nineteenth century music hall performances of Arthur Lloyd
(the subject of another of Froment’s works), who was known as “the
human card index” because his act consisted of him producing, as if
by magic, whatever document or image an audience member requested
from out of his voluminous coat. The arrangement of the images is also
reminiscent of art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg’s now-
lost Mnemosyne Atlas, for which he collected and arranged images
from an eclectic range of sources, not according to type or visual
style, but as idiosyncratic illustrations of thematic aspects of the
work, tracing the influence of classical antiquity on Renaissance art.
Though Froment’s image arrangements do not share Warburg’s specific
didactic intent, they do share his gregarious approach to the visual, in
which disparate images can come together to activate new meanings.
CW
Theâtre de poche, 2007
Video, 12:27
30
WU WENGUANG
(b. 1956 Yunnan, China) Documentary
filmmaker Wu Wenguang is one of the
leading voices in contemporary Chinese cinema, and a strong advocate
for a realist approach to the medium. In two early works, Bumming in
Beijing (1990) and At Home in the World (1995), Wu documented the
daily life and rituals of a down-and-out group of artists newly adrift
in the complex social landscape of post-reform China. His handheld
camera work, unscripted interview footage, and landscape of bleak,
rural poverty set them apart from the kind of documentary films
that had been previously made in China. In subsequent projects like
Jianghu: Life on the Road (1999), which documented a traveling troupe
of itinerant circus performers, Wu pioneered a spontaneous realism
of recording things only as they actually happened, often passing
the camera off to the subjects and being filmed himself, erasing
distinctions between author and subject. In the past two decades,
Wu has turned to digital video technology to liberate his work from
the expense and labor of cinematic production, a move which has
also allowed for a more immediate connection to lived experience and
real time. Recently, Wu has pushed these possibilities still farther,
with his ongoing Chinese Villagers’ Documentary Project, which put
cameras into the hands of regional locals (solicited through local
newspaper advertisements) to record and comment on their specific
villages. Realizing that non-professionals could provide a perspective
that no outsider ever could, Wu spearheaded this project, eventually
producing feature-length videos detailing the quotidian realities of
rural life. Committed to the most authentic rendering of reality that he
can produce through cinema, Wu gathered footage from villages where
most people had never even seen video cameras, turning the subjects
themselves into filmmakers. BT
China Villagers Documentary Project 1-4,
2006-2007
Videos, 8 hours
31
 MARK LECKEY
Mark Leckey’s videos and performance lectures have
(b. 1964 Birkenhead, UK)
marked him as a kind of amateur cultural anthropologist, who remixes
popular and subcultural phenomena with artistic tropes and references
from “high” culture to create beguiling, idiosyncratic hybrids. One of
Leckey’s most sprawling, ambitious works is his performance lecture
Cinema in the Round (2007-2008), in which he attempts to explain his
experience with images (particularly moving images) that possess a
peculiar, evocative tangibility. Over the course of the lecture, Leckey
employs an eccentric list of cultural sources including the paintings of
Philip Guston, Felix the Cat cartoons, and James Cameron’s blockbuster
Titanic (1997) to explore the tendency of certain images to “impose …
a sense of their actual weight, density, and volume, of their physical
being in the world.” Leckey argues that the images that make up his
personalized history share a tendency to “oscillate between image and
object” and engage with the viewer on a bodily level, inviting a kind
of palpation with the eyes, or a visual touching. As a result, Leckey’s
taxonomy presents us with an alternative mode for perceiving images,
one that engages with their physicality and urges us not only to look,
but also to experience. CW
Cinema in the Round, 2006-2008
Video, 42:21
32
LEE FRIEDLANDER
Lee Friedlander has spent over sixty years
(b. 1934 Aberdeen, U.S.A.)
documenting the social and physical landscape of America. His
numerous bodies of photographic work include portraits of legendary
jazz musicians, humorous and spatially complex street photographs,
candid, often playful self-portraits, natural landscapes, and
idiosyncratic nudes. He is recognized as one of the seminal figures
in twentieth century photography, and was included, along with Gary
Winogrand and Diane Arbus, in John Szarkowski’s landmark 1967
exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 2005, his work was the subject of a major touring retrospective that
was organized by the Museum of Modern Art.
Friedlander created the photographs that make up The Little Screens
while traveling around the United States in the 1960s. These
photographs are haunted by the luminous presence of disembodied
faces—some recognizable, some anonymous—as they were broadcast
on television screens in empty and often featureless hotel rooms
across the country. Characterized by photographer Walker Evans as
“deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate” in an article published
in Harper’s Bazaar in 1963, the photographs seemed to speak to
a particularly American anomie—a sense of alienation provoked by
the perception that human relationships were becoming increasingly
situated in the virtual space of the screen. CW
Florida, 1963
Gelatin silver print,
35 x 28 cm
33
 HEUNGSOON IM
JIKKEN KOBO

(b. 1969 Seoul, South Korea) A

video artist from Seoul, South Korea, Heungsoon
Im explores the rifts in Korean culture opened by changing economic THOMAS BAYRLE HAEGUE YANG PAUL SHARITS

and political conditions, often focusing on issues of class conflict

and property. Adhering to a style of critical realism informed by KATSUHIRO
YAMAGUCHI
documentary practice, he employs video, photography, and urban
geographic research to examine flows of capital, architecture, and the
ATARU SATO
lives of the working class, who are increasingly excluded from cultural
recognition and social production. In the two-channel video Memento
BRIDGET RILEY
(2003), two sequential narratives unfold on adjacent screens, inter-
KERSTIN RUPPRECHT TAUBA
woven by virtue of their parallel characters and activities. The left BRÄTSCH GEIGER AUERBACH

screen presents a slideshow of old family photographs, depicting the

artist and his family in all stages of life. Jangan-dong and Dapsimni,
the areas in Seoul where the artist grew up, are set in the backdrops, STAN VANDERBEEK

and their effaced rural past can now only be evoked by these personal
souvenirs. On the right screen, a steady, locked-off camera shot
CARSTEN
documents a trip to a professional photographer’s studio for a HÖLLER
GUO FENGYI
formal family portrait. The family members—older now, but familiar
from the still images on the left—slowly assemble and act out their
roles, while taking directions about how and where to pose from the
photographer’s assistant. Memento sets in motion two divergent modes SETH PRICE KAN XUAN
of image production: on one channel, a portrait of the Im family created
GLENN BROWN
through the aggregate collection of snapshots, on the other, through
the theatrical production of a single image. The capacity of images JACOB KASSAY

to convey character, time, and narrative resonates in the small space

between the two. BT IRINA BOTEA JOÃO MARIA
GUSMÃO +
PEDRO PAIVA 
HANYONG KIM

ELIOT
PORTER

HAROLD
EDGERTON
Memento, 2003 HANS-
Video, 15:00 PETER
FELDMANN ARTUR ŻMIJEWSKI

SHINRO OHTAKE

JOÃO MARIA
DAHN VO GUSMÃO +
PEDRO PAIVA 

DUNCAN HARUN FAROCKI

CAMPBELL

34 BIENNALE HALL
35 . GALLERY 2
 STAN VANDERBEEK
(b. 1927, d. 1984 New York City, U.S.A.) Stan
VanDerBeek was once a major figure
of the New York avant-garde, associating with luminaries like Claes
Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Robert Morris, Allan Kaprow, and Yvonne Rainer.
The subject of a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives in 1977,
VanDerBeek worked as an artist-in-residence at NASA and at MIT,
and exhibited at major museums and international art events. After
his death in 1984 at the age of 57 his work was largely forgotten, but
thanks to recent efforts by artists and his family, VanDerBeek is again
becoming more widely known.
Initially recognized for his experimental animation work, VanDerBeek
developed a fascination with technology later in life, becoming one
of the first artists to work seriously with computers. This interest
in technology, coupled with VanDerBeek’s affinity for the work of
Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, led to the conception
of his most ambitious unrealized project, the Movie-Drome (1965).
VanDerBeek’s idea was to create an international, networked image-
bank—accessible and customizable by the local publics—for the
presentation of images and video. Had VanDerBeek’s idea been
realized, it would have created a rough prototype of the Internet,
but the outlandish expense and attendant technological roadblocks
ensured that the project remained a dream. A model Movie-Drome was
constructed from material salvaged from an abandoned grain silo,
where he staged encompassing multi-media events using film and slide
projectors to fill the interior with a rotating collage of images. He later
created smaller, moveable versions called “Electric Assemblages,” a
version of which is featured in the Biennale. CW
Found Forms, 1969/2010
16mm film transfers, video
projection, slide projection,
dimensions variable
36
BRIDGET RILEY
(b. 1931 London, UK) British
painter Bridget Riley was a pioneering figure
in the Op-Art movement of the 1960s, which foregrounded pure visual
experience within the language of abstraction, and which was heavily
influenced by rapidly evolving media technologies and scientific
discourse. Riley first came to international acclaim in 1965, in the
group exhibition The Responsive Eye, at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York. Three years later, she represented Britain at the Venice
Biennale—the first woman ever to do so. Her complex, optically rich
patterns—initially painted in black and white—were designed to
activate neurological and physiological aspects of vision. Producing
oblique geometric shapes in seemingly endless, variable repetitions,
Riley’s works can produce sensations of movement or even colors within
the static image; sometimes, their overwhelming opticality induces a
kind of vertigo. Though composed of purely optical information, without
pictorial or representational suggestions, Riley’s canvases can evoke
images, sensations, and emotions within the mind of the viewer. Her
work has been said to focus on the so-called “mind/body problem”:
the tension between mental state and physical sensation in perceptual
experience. Throughout her career, she has remained focused and
committed to “the splendors to which pure sight alone has the key.”
Today, Riley’s idiom of abstraction has found currency with a new
generation of artists, who are building on her foundations in exploring
the farther reaches of optical and perceptual possibility. BT
Painting with Two Verticals, 2004
Oil on linen, 193 x 264 cm
37
 ATARU SATO
(b. 1986 Chiba, Japan) Ataru
Sato’s densely rendered pencil drawings pulse
with mutant energy. Strange hybrids of the organic and the inorganic,
the real and the fantastical, they seem to be a product of a mind
overloaded with images, gestated in and born out of the primordial
soup of popular culture. Sato has said of the production of his images:
“Like undulating waves, all things in sight approach me and draw
back. And I’m lost as to what I scoop up.” But, however random his
collection process for his source material, some visual elements return
repeatedly, as if they haunt corners of his mind that he is unable to
ever fully sweep clean. Images and stylistic tropes from Anime comics
and cartoons, a staple of Japanese boyhood, mix with darker, grown
up visions of hanged and faceless bodies, tortured lumps of flesh,
and sexually predatory succubi (female demons who seduce men while
they sleep). Like the strange and symbol-rich dreamscapes of the
Surrealists, Sato constructs his drawings by plumbing the depths of
the unconscious—both his own, and society’s—and cobbling together
the hidden detritus that he dredges up. CW
Flower Vase, 2006
Pencil on paper, 108 x 77 cm
38
THOMAS BAYRLE
Thomas Bayrle is best known for his distinctive
(b. 1937 Berlin, Germany)
“superforms,” dizzyingly complex images that appear to be computer-
generated, but which Bayrle has drawn, painted, and screen-printed by
hand since the early 1960s. Bayrle’s use of complex patterning in his
printmaking, photo-collage and design work upsets normal perception,
and influenced the German Pop movement after such foundational
figures as Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. Fascinated by the idea of
the mass, Bayrle’s early works critiqued Western-style consumerism
and exhibited an aesthetic and political affinity for Chinese communism.
But over the course of the 1960s, his stance became more ambivalent
as he embraced a more nuanced allegorization of the rapid advances
of (post-) modernity. Prefiguring the aesthetics of computer imaging,
his work can be seen as a visual lodestar for the nascent forms of
globalization. Mao (1966) is a kinetic painting on wood (outfitted with
an engine) in which party members are slowly transformed into a Maoist
star and then into the face of Chairman Mao himself. CW
Stalin (Red), 1970
Silkscreen print on colored
cardboard, 85 x 60 cm
39
 KATSUHIRO YAMAGUCHI
(b. 1928 Tokyo, Japan) Throughout
his long career, Japanese multi-media
artist Katsuhiro Yamaguchi has been a fearless adopter and pioneer
of media technologies, and a key force in cultivating (popular)
aesthetic sensibilities in post-war Japan. In 1951, he co-founded
the experimental media production group Jikken Kobo, and began
producing complex, optically exploratory films, often suffused with an
almost magically real visuality. His Adventure of the Eyes of Mr. R. S.,
a Test Pilot (1953) is a stark but seductive black and white slide show
with voice-over and dramatic, symphonic score. Sequentially gaining
visual momentum, the images depict various small glass shapes on
a white background, scattering light beams and casting mysterious
shadows, creating a miniature world. With shifting perspectives that
suggest an aerial view, the camera seems to pan over these small
models, producing a whimsical flight over a city of geometric, modernist
architecture. In the 1960s, Yamaguchi began to embrace video art and
technologically based installations. At the 1968 Venice Biennale, he
built a light-based sculpture called Bridge, and in 1969 participated in
Electro-Magica, a major international exhibition of new media art at the
Sony Building in Tokyo. In 1972, Yamaguchi founded Video Hiroba, an
artist collective that was part of a growing scene of video and media
practitioners in Japan. Throughout all this experimentation, Yamaguchi
retained his core artistic interests in cosmic, poetic visions and radical
visual modes. In recent years, he has returned to painting, both as a
way to seek a simpler practice and as a more critical response to the
role of digital and virtual technology in contemporary life. BT
Adventure of the Eyes of Mr. R.S.,
a Test-Pilot, 1953
Video, 4:55
40
HAEGUE YANG
(b. 1971 Seoul, South Korea) Haegue
Yang’s works consist of delicate,
purposeful arrangements of everyday objects and devices—venetian
blinds, light bulbs, fans, heaters, air conditioners, electric wires—which
envelop the senses and create abstract narratives. Yang’s installation
works often form a kind of playground for perceptual experience.
A room of Yang’s sculptures might offer such sensations as being
caressed by a cooling breeze or the radiating heat of a portable heater,
patterns of light filtered through a thicket of entangled venetian blinds
or odors wafting through the room from a scent emitter. Since 2006,
Yang has created collections of apparatuses and objects that share
a certain provisional, fragile quality but which nevertheless manage
to maintain cohesion and aesthetic balance. One of these collective
groupings, Series of Vulnerable Arrangements—Concern Towards
Personal Limits (2008), consists of a series of sculptures assembled
out of what appear to be clothing racks or stands for medical
equipment that have been festooned with all manner of materials—
Mardi Gras beads, Christmas lights, seashells, tinsel, colored electrical
cords, light bulbs, and various other detritus. In light of the work’s
subtitle, the sculptures take on a curious anthropomorphic cast,
becoming, perhaps, proxy representations of different guises that Yang
might assume in order to discover the contours of her own limits.
Taken as a kind of injunction, this practice of projection might extend
to the viewer as well—perhaps they are works that ask us not to
expand on our sensory understanding, but to expand on our sense of
ourselves through these strange, vulnerable proxies. CW
Series of Vulnerable Arrangements—Concerns Towards Personal Limits, 2009
Installation with 7 light sculptures, dimensions variable
41
 JIKKEN KOBO/ EXPERIMENTAL WORKSHOP
(SHOZO KITADAI, KIYOJI OTSUJI, KATSUHIRO YAMAGUCHI)
Jikken Kobo, or the Experimental Workshop, was a Japanese
(1951-1958)
collective of artists, musicians, and writers active from roughly
1951-1958. They were pioneers of electronic music and employed a
heterogeneous, inter-disciplinary approach to media, performance,
spectacle, and art that synthesized a diverse range of practices. The
composers Joji Yuasa and Toru Takemitsu, critic and theorist Shuzo
Takiguchi, and media artist Katsuhiro Yamaguchi were among the
founding members. The group forms a key node in the story of the
postwar avant-garde, having independently arrived at radical cultural
practices that were simultaneously being developed by artists at Black
Mountain College in North Carolina, and the Independent Group in
London.
In 1955, the Workshop produced a promotional film for the Japanese
bicycle industry called Ginrin (Silver Wheel). Though technically an
advocacy film for a mainstream commercial sector, it was the product
of a radical visuality: a little boy falls asleep while reading a children’s
book about cycling, and the rest of the film is his bizarre, hallucinatory
dream of flying bicycles, spinning chrome wheels, floating ball-
bearings, and kaleidoscopic multiple exposures. The sound track mixes
eerie wind chimes, signaling the lone, lost protagonist, with operatic,
uplifting scores lifted directly from Hollywood. A spectacular cinematic
gesture, Silver Wheel showcases both Japan’s 1950s cultural optimism
and the collaborative possibilities between corporate industry and the
avant-garde that existed before the visual language of capital had
calcified. Seen today, the voice of the artists emerges most clearly:
though ostensibly cultural propaganda, it is really a visual treatise on
dreaming as a different way to view the world. BT
Ginrin (Silver Wheel), 1955
35mm film transferred to DVD, 11:57
42
PAUL SHARITS
(b. 1943 Denver, U.S.A. d. 1993 Buffalo, U.S.A.) Paul
Sharits was an experimental
filmmaker associated with the Structural film movement in America. An
early protégé of the pioneering filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whose hand-
painted films expressed an interest in film’s materiality, Sharits created
film works that used a variety of methods to reflect on the process of
filmmaking itself. One of Sharits’s most common filmic techniques was
the creation of a stroboscopic effect (also known as a “flicker” effect),
achieved through rapid editing and the periodic insertion of single
frames of opaque film among the film’s exposed frames. This created a
filmic flicker visually reminiscent of the action of the shutter of
a motion picture camera.
In the 1970s, Sharits began to experiment with large-scale installation
works, incorporating strategies from his earlier films. Shutter Interface
(1975) employs four film projectors, each connected to a separate
sound system, that project overlapping frames of flickering color. The
speakers emit a series of tones corresponding to the opaque frames
of each film. The result is a frenetic aural and visual experience that
verges on sensory overload. As with many of Sharits’s films, the
initial cacophony of sound and image resolves, with patience, into a
meditative experience. Sharits, in fact, described his works as akin to
Buddhist mandalas—elaborate symmetrical images that are used as
aids in meditation—that have been extended into the dimension
of time. CW
Shutter Interface, 1975
Four 16mm film projections
43
 TAUBA AUERBACH
(b. 1981 San Francisco, U.S.A.) Tauba
Auerbach’s multi-faceted output includes
painting, drawing, design, and sculpture. Recuperating and expanding
upon the legacies of Op Art, Auerbach explores the interstices among
contemporary technology’s competing systems of vision: computer
graphics, print production, typography, digitized video, and television
broadcasting. Her works find hidden beauty in the artifacts of these
processes: textures, creases, dot patterns, low-bit graphics, and
static. Through persistent re-workings of letterforms and type designs,
she also articulates the shifting meanings between words and word
signs. Dense with undulating patterns and colors, Auerbach’s works
only sometimes resolve themselves into the clarity of a recognizable
form.
Her new series of Untitled Fold Paintings—large acrylic paintings of
creases and folds—produce optical illusions that activate the process
of viewing. The appearance that the canvas is itself folded is often
in conflict with a close inspection of the work’s surface. The form is
an illusion of changing depths, and what seems to be a patterned
repetition often mutates across the face of the work, never repeating
itself exactly. Her calculated system of chance occurrences and formal
repetitions draws from her wider interests in science and mathematics.
Inviting a certain perceptual and phenomenological confusion,
Auerbach’s works insist on producing an image within the mind of
a participating viewer, where perception and apprehension are the
product of an active collaboration. BT
Untitled Fold Painting II, 2009
Acrylic on canvas, 132 x 102 cm
44
KERSTIN BRÄTSCH
(b. 1979 Hamburg, Germany) Kerstin
Brätsch’s paintings, collages, sculptures,
performances, and collaborations all support and interact with each
other: paintings can be the backgrounds for performances, collages
the products of collaboration, a sculpture the display mechanism for
a publication. Creating these interrelationships is key to Brätsch’s
practice, which cross-pollinates issues surrounding abstraction,
figuration, distribution, and information, while specifically adhering
to none of them. Equivocation is employed as strategy: her work is a
hedging of bets, a spreading of resources, leaping between media as
her ideas demand.
The large-scale abstract paintings of Brätsch’s Psychic Series
approach the pictorial or descriptive (hair, larvae, TV static, shards
of glass) by combining discernible shapes and blended backgrounds,
but without imaging anything specific. Inspired by her time in New York
and its vast array of professional psychics, these works can be read
as portraits of the mediums themselves, or of personages psychically
channeled. In certain paintings, faces are nearly discernible, as if in
some kind of turmoil: dissolving, collapsing, and appearing from out of
nothingness. Others are sheer patterns, fields of color bars creating
spatial distinctions. The works give form to the invisible, the absent,
the lost: an unverifiable source here finds an indecipherable outlet, not
unlike the static of a television receiving no signal. BT
Untitled, from Psychic Series, 2007
Oil on Paper, 180 x 263 cm
45
 RUPPRECHT GEIGER
(b. 1908, d. 2009 Munich, Germany) Rupprecht
Geiger was an abstract painter
and sculptor known for his innovatively shaped canvases and intense
fascination with the color red. The only child of the painter Willi Geiger,
Rupprecht was originally trained as an architect and practiced his
trade at various firms in Germany until the beginning of WWII, when
he fought briefly on the Russian front and served as a military painter
in the Ukraine. After the war, Geiger moved back to Munich and began
making abstract paintings. One year later, he helped to form the
group Zen 49, an organization of like-minded painters who practiced
Farbfeldmalerei (color field painting), a style whose simplicity and
straightforwardness had, they believed, a kinship with Zen meditative
practices. During this period, Geiger created monochromatic geometric
canvases that broke with the normative rectangular format, taking the
form of circles, rhombuses, and other irregular shapes, years before
similar innovations were made in the United States.
In the 1970s, Geiger began a decades-long engagement with the color
red, in all its hues and densities. To make these vibrantly colored works,
Geiger would often apply his paint with a spray technique that gave his
surfaces a sumptuous depth and consistency. Perhaps the culmination
of this work is Rote Trombe (Red Whirlwind, 1985), an installation-
style sculpture that takes the form of a massive funnel of red fabric.
When viewed from below, the work presents an all-encompassing field
of red, allowing the viewer to meditate on the essence of Geiger’s
idiosyncratic visual obsession. CW
Rote Trombe, 1985
Dyed nylon, 400 x 700 cm
46
GUO FENGYI
(b. 1942, d. 2010, Xi’an, China) The
Chinese artist Guo Fengyi was a healer,
shaman, and visionary whose striking, idiosyncratic ink drawings
reflect her translation of mystical sensations. Her fantastical pictorial
representations of uncannily anthropomorphic characters—divine
spirits, magical beings, the structures of cosmic energies, gender-
specific physiological systems—are delicately rendered in thousands
of finely inked brushstrokes on large sheets of rice paper or cloth.
The images are almost channeled through her, effacing the difference
between vision and transcription; as she once said, “I draw because I
do not know, I draw to know.”
In 1987, Guo retired from her industrial chemical job due to illness,
and the meditative, physical practice of qi-gong became a method of
healing herself. Her drawings derive from Chinese mythology, history,
and philosophy, and are made under the trance of her qi-gong healing
studies as direct transcriptions of these meditative visions. Though
formally untrained in art, her increasingly revelatory visions produced
a wide array of drawings, and over the years her work has addressed
wider medical issues. In her series of drawings related to the SARS
illness, an epidemic that swept through southern China in 2002-
2003, Guo depicts the virus as gruesome, human-animal hybrids that
emerge from nothingness. In tall, vertically oriented scrolls, the beasts
duplicate themselves in mirrored-reverse from top to bottom, much like
the jack or queen in a deck of cards. Guo’s mystical practice lends the
images a shamanistic dimension, they are said to have an aspect of
fortune telling layered within them, revealing destinies, and encoding
aspects of the future. As such, people have turned to these drawings
as healing tools, as icons of illness and health, and possible maps from
one to the other. BT
Image of Luoshu Book, 1990
Drawing on paper, 124 x 88 cm
47
 CARSTEN HÖLLER
Carsten Höller holds a doctorate in biology, and
(b. 1961 Brussels, Belgium)
has utilized his science training to create works that explore the
nature of human perception and the biochemistry of human emotions.
The vast majority of Höller’s works contain an element of viewer
participation—artworks as laboratory experiments, with the viewer
as test subject. Engaging with Höller’s work might involve wearing
specially designed mirrored glasses that turn the world upside-
down (Upside-Down Glasses, 2001), being submerged in a sensory
deprivation tank (Psycho-Tank, 1999), sliding down an enormous,
spiraling slide (Test Site, 2006), or experiencing close-eyed visual
hallucinations as a result of a wall of specially calibrated flashing
lights (Light Wall, 2000). Höller’s works challenge viewers to engage
with art on a physiological level, and to reflect on human processes of
perception and embodiment.
In Infrared Room (2006), Höller arranges a series of infrared cameras
in a darkened room to record the presence of gallery visitors. These
recordings are then projected back into the same space but with a
barely perceptible delay. At first, the work appears to be merely an
elaborate mirror. Gradually however, the subtle projection lag becomes
apparent, and the mediated nature of the reflection becomes unnerving
as the delay between action and image creates a disconnected self-
image, a kind of out-of-body experience. The use of infrared cameras—
which record a spectrum of light normally outside of the human optical
register—heightens this strange sensation, creating a double sense of
perceiving what would otherwise remain invisible. CW
Three-fold Delayed Infrared Room, 2004
Infrared cameras, video projectors,
dimensions variable
48
JACOB KASSAY
(b. 1984 Buffalo, U.S.A.) While
in the Visual Studies department at SUNY
Buffalo, Jacob Kassay was interested in the more experimental,
sometimes camera-less realm of photography, as well as the paintings
of Ad Reinhardt or Piero Manzoni, whose works seemed to evolve
throughout the real-time experience of viewing. Kassay’s silver-plated
mirror paintings strike a unique balance between photography, painting,
and sculpture. Gessoing and painting his canvases with solid blocks of
color or various mediums, Kassay then sends them to undergo a silver-
plating process, involving several chemical baths and spray-applied
layers of silver ions. The resulting metallic sheen is neither clear nor
uniform, but rather a mottled, nested set of reflective surfaces, each
slightly clouding out the others, reflecting back a ghostly, attenuated
image of the beholder.
These silver-on-canvas works began as a test process for new
paintings that he didn’t like, and Kassay initially plated the canvases
he felt were unsuccessful. But when they returned as alchemically
changed objects, he began experimenting with different methods
of applying the gesso or paint as a way to control the outcome of
the plating process. The works still bear the oxidized traces of the
chemical process in their scarred, darkened edges, the remnants of
locations on the canvas without paint or undercoating. Originally, he
thought of them as monochromatic, since they were all sprayed as
one whole object, but in fact, their surfaces change and shimmer as
they are viewed. In giving back a rough glimpse of the viewer through
a process of chemically applied silver onto a pictorial ground, they
encode an optical experience derived from photographic logic, but
absent of photography itself. BT
Untitled, 2009
Acrylic and silver deposit on canvas, 127 x 97 cm
49
 KAN XUAN
(b. 1972 Xuancheng, China) Kan
Xuan’s work is concerned with the nature and
possible failures of representation. In the video Object (2003), she
filmed various objects being dropped or poured into a container of
water. As each material meets the water, Kan whispers to the viewer
whether it appears grey, black, or white in the monochrome space of
the video (for example, “Coca-Cola is grey”). This cognitive dissonance
between the seen and the known, between representation and reality,
is precisely the point. Beginning with the particulars of the represented
objects, Kan expands this question outwards to speak broadly about
the nature of image making itself.
Or Everything (2005) can be seen as a rejoinder to the arguments of
iconoclasts, who believe that idols or representations of deities and
holy figures divert us from the true essence of that which they depict.
The video portrays a series of Buddha figures whose likenesses have
been made to tremble in the space of the video, seeming thus to exist
in a borderline state between presence and absence. This liminal state
is key to understanding not only the nature of religious imagery, which
is designed to act as an intermediary step between oneself and the
true nature of the deity, but also the nature of the image itself: while
the image can never be what it represents, it can act as a tool or token
that aides in the apprehension of that which exists beyond it. CW
Looking looking looking for…, 2001
Video, 2:58
50
GLENN BROWN
Glenn Brown’s assiduously rendered paintings cut
(b. 1966 Hexham, UK)
a twisted path through the annals of art history. Using sources as
diverse as Picasso, Dali, Fragonard, and Rembrandt, Brown remixes
pre-existing works to fit his own brand of mutant classicism. One of
Brown’s most frequent sources is the work of German-born British
painter Frank Auerbach, whose thickly impastoed, expressionist
paintings have become something of an aesthetic touchstone for
Brown’s work. While Brown’s paintings roil with gestural energy, what
appear to be impassioned brushstrokes and confectionary accretions
of paint are the result of a painstaking process of trompe l’oeil; the
canvases are in fact flat and slick, like those of an old master painting.
As a result, Brown’s paintings can feel as if they are encased in amber,
rendering once-living gestures frozen and death-like. Adding to this
eerie feeling is the fact that many of Brown’s subjects look sick or even
zombified—skin is rendered in putrescent greens and blues, flowers
seem blighted by mysterious, malevolent diseases, faces liquefy and
congeal into disquieting psychedelic lumps. Half Dr. Frankenstein and
half pasticheur, Brown’s paintings reanimate old images and give them
a strange new life. CW
Searched Hard for You and Your Special Ways, 1995
Oil on canvas, 89 x 75cm
51
 HAROLD EDGERTON
(b. 1903 Fremont, U.S.A.; d. 1990 Cambridge, U.S.A.) In
1931, while completing a
doctorate in electrical engineering at MIT, Harold Edgerton developed
and perfected the use of stroboscopic light to create ultra high-
speed photography. Edgerton soon realized that his photographic
technique had potential aesthetic, as well as scientific, interest and
began making photographs of everyday phenomena that occur faster
than the eye can perceive. Outside scientific circles Edgerton is best
known for these images, which began to appear in publications and
exhibitions around the world, including Photography 1839-1937, the
first photography exhibition ever mounted at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, organized by Beaumont Newhall in 1937.
In addition to the accolades Edgerton garnered for his work in high-
speed photography, he was also widely recognized for developing
scientific and military applications for stroboscopic imaging. Edgerton
served in Italy, France, and England during WWII as a technical
representative for the US Army Air Force, developing and directing the
use of stroboscopic photography in nighttime aerial reconnaissance, an
innovation for which he was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1946. In
1947, along with long-time collaborators Kenneth J. Germeshausen and
Herbert E. Grier, Edgerton invented a camera (dubbed the Raptronic)
as part of their work with the Atomic Energy Commission. The Raptronic
was designed to photograph the rapidly changing states of matter at
the beginning of nuclear explosions. At the time, it was the fastest
camera in the world, capable of photographing at speeds of up to ten
billionths of a second, and rendering the invisible visible. CW
Antique Gun Firing, 1936
Gelatin silver print, 51 x 61 cm
52
ELIOT PORTER
(b. 1901 Winnetka, U.S.A.; d. 1990 Santa Fe, U.S.A.) Eliot
Porter taught himself
photography as a teenager, when he began photographing the
landscape around his parent’s island summer home in Penobscot
Bay, Maine. Porter continued to pursue photography while attending
Harvard University, where he worked as a biomedical researcher after
earning degrees in chemical engineering and in medicine. In the mid
1930s, Porter’s brother Fairfield Porter—a well-known realist painter
working in New York—arranged for Eliot to meet the photographers
Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz. After Stieglitz exhibited Porter’s
work at his New York gallery, An American Place, Porter left his job at
Harvard to focus on his photographic explorations of nature.
Porter put his keen technical aptitude to good use by teaching himself
elaborate photographic process and techniques, occasionally even
inventing new ones. His passionate interest in photographing birds
prompted his embrace of color photography in the 1940s, when
he became one of the first nature photographers to do so. He
taught himself the laborious process of dye-transfer printing, which
was better able to represent the colors of the birds’ plumage, and
constructed elaborate lighting rigs and scaffolds that allowed him to
record the birds in flight with his cumbersome large-format camera. The
resulting photographs were unlike any that had come before them: they
were both exacting documents of the natural world and beguiling works
of art, revealing details invisible to the naked eye. CW
Osprey, Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, 1954
Kodak Dye-transfer print, 51 x 61 cm
53
 ARTUR ŻMIJEWSKI
Artur Żmijewski’s confrontational video works
(b. 1966 Warsaw, Poland)
unflinchingly engage with historical and bodily trauma, often through
the creation of scenarios that draw normally hidden suffering or conflict
to the surface. Żmijewski is particularly known for his works that deal
with the legacy of the Holocaust and some of the daily difficulties
facing disabled people, often in ways that evoke complex or seemingly
contradictory emotions. For Singing Lesson 2 (2003), Żmijewski
arranged for a group of teenagers from a school for the hearing
impaired to perform choral selections from Bach in a church in Leipzig,
with inevitably dissonant results. Like much of Żmijewski’s work, it is a
scenario that is in some ways cruel, an illustration of the brutal reality
of what he calls “the impossible remaining impossible.” At the same time,
the undeniable pride that can be seen on the faces of the choristers
mitigates any impulse towards pity. This tangled emotional scenario, in
which one is forced to acknowledge the reality of suffering in a way that
evokes empathy but denies refuge in sentimentality, is for Żmijewski
more in keeping with the true nature of hardship and suffering.
For the Biennale, Żmijewski has created a new work that involves people
living with blindness. He has asked blind volunteers to paint the world
as they see it, and to give visual representation to the invisible, or to
what is generally thought of as invisible. In the context of the exhibition,
which is so much concerned with the way images change our relationship
to the world, blindness confronts us with the question of what it is like
to live in a world without images. CW
Untitled, 2010
Video
54
JOÃO MARIA GUSMÃO & PEDRO PAIVA
The Portuguese artists João Maria Gusmão and
(b. 1979, 1977, Lisbon, Portugal)
Pedro Paiva have produced a body of 16mm films and installation works
that explore existential and philosophic questions with poetry, economy,
and humor. Staging short, semi-narrative scenes with intentionally
low-tech special effects, the films often revolve around a lone
character enacting a simple, repetitive task, which open the work up to
fundamental issues of choice, action, and belief. Blunt absurdity is a
commonly deployed tactic: in Attempt at Liquid Sculpture (2007), water
is poured slowly over a sculptural armature, suggesting an impossible
attempt to use it to make a solid form; in The Torch Man (2007) a man
appears to hold a flame in his bare hand as he guides viewers through
a darkened cave. For the installation Eye Model (2006), an ostrich egg,
projected spotlight, wooden table, and glass lens are arranged within a
camera obscura, producing a fanciful interpretation of the process of
vision. In the dark of the room, the floating orbs, light beam, and cast
shadows—recreating the path of light through the retina—suggest a
basement planetarium, or a nineteenth century science experiment.
Poking at the philosophical implications of vision, the work conflates
the vastness of space with the miniature mechanics of the eyeball.
Undergirding Gusmão and Paiva’s diverse practice is a mining of
the sprawling legacies—even fictional ones—of philosophy, and an
exploration of alternate epistemologies and their still-provocative
futures. In their films and installations, our lost knowledge systems,
despite being outdated by technology, are still filled with the potential
for meaning, wonder, and insight. BT
Eye Model, 2006
Camera obscura system with table, ostrich eggs,
lens, and spotlight, dimensions variable
55
 HARUN FAROCKI
(b. 1944 Neutitschein, Czechoslovakia) Harun
Farocki began his filmmaking career
in Berlin in the 1960s with a series of agit-prop anti-Vietnam War films,
which were inspired in part by the critical theories of the Frankfurt
School. Later films retained the political concerns of these early works,
but eschewed didacticism in favor of a more direct documentary style,
reminiscent of cinéma vérité. Many of these later films shifted towards
a more general engagement with themes surrounding the increasing
saturation of society with media and imaging technologies, and, in
particular, how these changes have led to a corresponding increase in
social control and dehumanization.
In 1990s, Farocki began creating multi-channel immersive video
environments designed for exhibition in an art context. In the Biennale,
Transmission (2007) concerns sites of pilgrimage, where contact
with sculptures and monuments provides healing, luck, or catharsis,
while Immersion (2009) concerns an immersive war simulation program
designed to help treat veterans of the Iraq War suffering from post-
traumatic stress. Though disparate in their subject matter, both works
share a concern with the potential healing power of images. At the
same time, rather than simply extolling the power of images to heal,
Transmission can also be seen as a tragic meditation on our inability
to comprehend those forces and events that are larger than ourselves
without the aid of mediating objects, while Immersion reflects on the
increasingly mediated nature of warfare, which turns even the grisliest
images of violence into just another scene in a video game. CW
Immersion, 2010
2-channel video installation, 20:00
56
SHINRO OHTAKE
(b. 1955 Tokyo, Japan) Since
Shinro Ohtake’s first solo show in 1985, his
multi-layered works in painting, sculpture, and bookmaking have
become an influential presence in Japanese contemporary art.
Responding directly to the mass media and contemporary urban life,
Ohtake’s works are characterized by their voracious, maximalist
accumulations of found materials, which balance the slap-dash and the
considered, pairing short bursts of feverish energy with methodically
layered imagery. This sense of purposeful chaos also translates into
Ohtake’s work in music, where he has created tightly coiled noise rock
with his influential band JUKE/19, as well as with his current band
Puzzle Punks, which he formed in collaboration with Boredom’s front
man Yamataka Eye in 1995. One of the most prominent and consistent
facets of Ohtake’s practice has been his ongoing series of Scrapbooks,
which he began to make in 1977. Like a traditional scrapbook, these
books hold mountainous collections of found materials that Ohtake
collages and paints over to create complex, stratified compositions on
each of the books’ pages, rendering them into quasi-sculptural objects.
However, unlike a traditional scrapbook, his works have no specific
diaristic function. Instead, they function more as a series of cultural
crystallization points, where Ohtake’s labor transforms the cast-off
sweepings of visual culture into heightened versions of themselves. CW
Scrapbook #33, 1983, London/Africa (Kenya), 1983
138 pages, 56 x 22 x 15 cm
57
 HANYONG KIM
(b. 1924 Seongcheon, Korea) Hanyong
Kim began his photographic career
in 1947 at Pictorial Korea, a monthly magazine in Seoul. After the
outbreak of the Korean War, Kim fled south to Pusan, South Korea,
where he worked as a freelance photojournalist for the Pusan Daily.
Kim worked at the paper for a number of years, occasionally as a
war correspondent, but he also worked to maintain and expand a
small studio of his own. Gradually, Kim built his personal studio
into a thriving business, producing all manner of photographs, from
advertising images for large clients such as OB and Pilak Dairy Co.
Ltd. (for whom he produced Korea’s first color advertisement) to artful
nudes, experimental portraits, and landscape views from around the
world.
For the Biennale, Kim will present a selection of his advertising
photographs, but stripped of their advertising copy. Shorn of their
intended function, the pictures become heightened versions of
themselves: we notice the exaggerated methods of display (product
labels clearly legible, faces smiling at the camera, hair and makeup
always perfect) and the artifice of staging and lighting. These
elements combine to transform his models into blank, ideal versions
of themselves. The photographs lay bare the grammar of advertising
photography, in which the uniqueness of the individual is downplayed in
favor of generic expressions of delight in the theater of consumption.
CW
Untitled, n.d.
C-print, dimensions variable
58
DUNCAN CAMPBELL
(b. 1972 Dublin, Ireland) Duncan
Campbell’s films employ a documentary-
style approach, though with a self-reflexive understanding of the
impossibility of fully reconstituting history. Blending archival footage
with both written and filmic original material, these highly subjective
films address aspects of the tumultuous history of Campbell’s
native Ireland, specifically the Northern Irish Troubles. In Bernadette
(2008), Campbell creates a portrait of the charismatic Bernadette
Devlin, who, in 1969, when she was just 21 years old, became the
youngest women to ever serve as a member of the British Parliament.
Known for her confrontational manner and implacable devotion to
justice and independence in Northern Ireland, Devlin quickly became
a hero to those devoted to the cause of Nationalism. Campbell’s film
provides an impressionistic portrait of Devlin’s unlikely political career,
weaving together footage that shows her both as an impassioned
leader and a media celebrity. But this documentary-style collage of
archival material gives way at the end of the film to a fragmentary
meditation on the nature of Devlin’s dual life as an individual and
an icon of Nationalist resistance. As her monologue begins, an
interviewer asks, “You say you worked against the image—who was the
real Bernadette?” Devlin gives a succinct reply, saying that she was
just another young person growing up under a system of injustice in
which she didn’t want to grow old, but as the subsequent monologue
unravels, it becomes clear that the reality is far from simple—once one
becomes an image, it is hard to remember what the real really was. CW
Bernadette, 2008
Video, 37:10
59
 DANH VO
(b. 1974 Ba Ria, Vietnam) Danh
Vo’s work investigates history through its
trace remains, and his installations often rely on the bundled gravity of
seemingly minor objects, which enunciate their full meaning within Vo’s
spare constructions of relationship and syntax. Trinkets are rescued
from obscurity; the web of the world’s conflicts and cultural legacies
are made palpable through their tiny presence. Vo, a Vietnamese refugee
who grew up in Denmark, has produced an array of projects exploring
the peripheral, often personal legacies of the Vietnam War and the long
historical trajectories that frame it.
Vo is a selector, arranger, and conductor of an orchestra of found
objects: the poetics in his projects emerge from their collective
voice and intertwined resonance. Vo’s seemingly simple, sentimental
conceptualism transforms everyday objects into vessels of extraordinary
weight and meaning through the subtlest possible gesture, a strategy
he shares with Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose work Vo admires and
about whom he has written. In the Biennale, a found Civil War flag
(deaccessioned from a Massachusetts Historical Society), a paper
dress emblazoned with logos from Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential
campaign, and a brightly colored, wall-mounted animal mask all trace
different uses of the red/white/blue color motif in American political
propaganda. Setting these objects into relief are two makeshift grave
markers for Vo’s grandparents, white crosses with English spellings of
their Vietnamese names. Signifiers of the West’s long history of religious
imperialism in South East Asia, though also authentic family relics, these
two ready-mades set off an array of connections in relation to the Nixon
paper dress, which was produced against the background of America’s
escalating war in Vietnam. BT
Untitled, 2010
Civil War era flag, hand-painted with
blood stripe, 300 x 200 cm
60
HANS-PETER FELDMANN
(b. 1941 Dusseldorf, Germany) Hans-Peter
Feldmann first began archiving and
recontextualizing images appropriated from the vast storehouses of
visual culture as part of his artistic practice in the 1960s. Feldmann
playfully corrals images from magazines, catalogs, books and other
printed matter into seemingly arbitrary categories, delimited in the
works’ wry, deadpan titles: All The Clothes of a Woman (1973-2002),
Legs (2008), Flower Pictures (2006), One Pound Strawberries (2004),
Pictures of Car Radios Taken While Good Music Was Playing (2004).
These collections have been exhibited as multiples, in the form of books,
postcards, and posters as well as in grids or loose clusters on the wall.
Feldmann’s 9/12 Front Page (2001) is a room-sized collection of
the front pages of international newspapers from the day after the
September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York.
The newspapers take a range of approaches to the tragedy, with sober
headlines like “US Attacked” (The New York Times) and “The New War”
(Le Figaro), declarations of doom as in “Apocalypse” (The Daily Mail), or
expressions of fragile hope, as in “Still Alive” (The Evening Standard).
The layout of the pages also varies widely, from the full-page image on
the cover of The Times, to the small thumbnail on the cover of Mundo.
The images, however, are oddly consistent: the instantly iconic pictures
of the South Tower erupting in flames and of the towers crumbling to
the ground in a cloud of dust. Feldmann’s work can thus be seen as a
meditation on the representation of history through images—how certain
images can become instant icons or immaterial monuments, and how such
images can in turn transform our perception of historic events. CW
9/12 Frontpage (detail), 2001
151 newspapers, 60 x 40 cm
61
 IRINA BOTEA
(b. 1970 Ploiesti, Romania) Irina
Botea’s video works often engage with
Romanian life and history, particularly as they relate to the legacy of
Communism and the revolution. In 1989, Romanians revolted against
their oppressive Communist government, lead by Nicolae Ceauşescu.
Over the course of the weeklong revolution, violent riots culminated
in the trial and execution of Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena, by firing
squad. Much of the rioting and confrontation occurred in front of
television cameras, and the revolution became known around the world
as the first to unfold live on television. In Auditions for a Revolution
(2006) Botea restages televised scenes of the 1989 Revolution—
further lifted from filmmaker Harun Farocki’s 1993 film Videograms of
a Revolution—using a group of students in Chicago. The students, who
do not speak Romanian, are instructed to recite news announcements
and revolutionary slogans phonetically, unaware of their meanings. This
gap between what is said and what is understood acts as a structuring
metaphor throughout the work, pointing to our necessarily incomplete
understanding of mediated events and to the facets of experience that
are lost when events are rewritten as historical memory. CW
Auditions for a Revolution, 2006
Video, 24:00
62
SETH PRICE
(b. 1973, East Jerusalem) In
both his writing and his artwork, Seth Price has
engaged closely with our relationship to images. Price has focused
his efforts on issues surrounding image reception and distribution,
especially in relation to the increasing prevalence of digital media. A
key aspect of these concerns, thematized in Price’s work, is digital
imagery’s lack of any traditional, stable relation to its support—as, for
example, a painting would have to the canvas on which it is painted.
Unmoored, the digital image becomes a specter that is both absent and
present, freely circulating and constantly changing.
Untitled (Hostage Video Still) (2008) and the series Addresses
(2006) most aptly represent the multifaceted implications of the
dematerialized digital image. Both deal with the infamous video of
the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl at the hands of a
militant Pakistani group, which was widely circulated on the Internet
following Pearl’s execution. Untitled (Hostage Video Still) features a
digitally altered frame from the video that shows one of Pearl’s captors
holding his freshly severed head aloft, while the Addresses series is
a collection of screen prints made from images of Caravaggio’s David
with the Head of Goliath (c.1609-1610) downloaded from the internet.
Both are icons of violence, which seem strangely reminiscent of one
another. Though the video execution recalls the Caravaggio image,
strangely, the Caravaggio image seems also to recall the video of
Pearl’s future beheading. Characteristically contemporary, these
disembodied images, when digitized and filtered through the Internet,
become part of the same code—they have lost their spatial and
temporal bearings and are now merely part of the broader field of the
visual. CW
Hostage Video Still, 2006
Sign ink on polyester film,
dimensions variable
63
 GU DEXIN

CARL ANDRE TUOL SLENG PRISON PHOTOGRAPHS

LEANDRO
KATZ PAUL FUSCO LIU WEI GUSTAV METZGER

KATHARINA SERGEY USEFUL HITO

FRITSCH ZARVA PHOTO- STEYERL
GRAPHY

THOMAS RABIH
HIRSCHHORN MROUÉ
EYE
BYUNGSOO CHOI GLASS
SHOP
JEAN FAUTRIER

ZHAO SHUTONG, WANG GUANYI

AND THE RENT COLLECTION
COURTYARD COLLECTIVE

MARK OVERPLUS
LECKEY PROJECT

64 BIENNALE HALL . GALLERY 3

 OVERPLUS PROJECT
(Kang Sun-Ho, Kim Yong-Jin, Park Sung-Wan, Jung Da-Un; established 2008) Overplus
Project
is comprised of a group of students from Gwangju, South Korea, who
create works that comment on the contemporary culture of image
surplus. Recently, the members of Overplus have taken to making
portraits in public parks around the city of Gwangju. With this action,
Overplus contributes yet more images to a culture that has already
reached the point of supersaturation—a project consistent with
the group’s name, which connotes excess and superfluity. However,
Overplus makes it clear that their intentions do not merely lie in
gestures toward cultural overload, but are rather aligned with a form
of cultural healing. By painting portraits, the members of Overplus
hope that they can help the sitters reconnect with their sense of self,
a sense that is too often atomized or repressed by the machinations
of image culture. For the Biennale, Overplus is offering a free portrait
service in the park outside of the main exhibition hall. CW
MARK LECKEY (see p32)
The March of the Big White Barbarians, 2005
Video, 7:00
66
ZHAO SHUTONG, WANG GUANYI AND THE RENT COLLECTION
COURTYARD COLLECTIVE
In 1965,
(Collective at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, Sichuan Province, China)
a group of students and teachers at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute
in Chongqing were commissioned by the provincial government of
Sichuan to create a series of 114 life-sized sculptures depicting
the exploitation of the peasant farmers at the hands of a wealthy
landowner, Liu Wen-tsai. The sculptures were to be installed in the
courtyard of Liu’s former manor house, which was converted into
a museum of class struggle following the creation of the People’s
Republic of China. Originally rendered in humble materials such as
wood, clay, and straw, the sculptures were arranged in a series of
narrative tableaux in which the exploitation and suffering of the rural
population culminate in a scene of uprising and revolt.
After its first public exhibition in November 1965, Rent Collection
Courtyard drew much praise from the Maoist government, who
immediately recognized the work’s persuasive potential. In 1966, at
the start of the Cultural Revolution, Rent Collection Courtyard was
declared by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing—entrusted with direct control over
culture through the Central Committee of the Cultural Revolution—to
be a model artwork for the orientation of the visual arts. In subsequent
years, the collective produced exhibition copies from more durable
materials to be exhibited throughout China, but the 103 figure 1974-
1978 copper-plated fiberglass edition is the only one that survives
today. In recent years, contemporary Chinese artists have repeatedly
returned to this work of Socialist Realism, which unites traditional
Chinese, Soviet, and Western elements. CW
Rent Collection Courtyard, 1974-1978
103 copper-plated fiberglass sculptures, life size
67
 BYUNGSOO CHOI
On June 9, 1987 Yonsei University student Lee
(b. 1960 Seoul, South Korea)
Han-yeol Lee (1966-1987) was struck in the head by a police tear
gas canister while attending a pro-democracy rally in Seoul, and later
died from his injuries. Lee’s death quickly became a rallying point for
members of the democracy movement, and his funeral drew crowds
estimated in the millions. One of the major focal points of Lee’s funeral
was a large memorial portrait of the fallen activist painted by the artist
and fellow democracy-fighter Byungsoo Choi. A truck displaying the
portrait followed the mourners on their route from Seoul to Gwangju,
where the young man was born. After the funeral, Choi’s painting was
publically displayed at Yonsei University as a memorial, but it was
quickly attacked and destroyed by Seoul police forces, which sought
to downplay Lee’s death. Choi painted an identical portrait to replace
the one that had been destroyed, but soon after it was replaced, this
second portrait was slashed with knives, an act of vandalism that
many also attributed to the police. The slashed painting was eventually
repaired, and is on view in the Biennale, affixed to a truck in the same
manner as during Lee’s funeral. Over the course of its two iterations,
Choi’s image has acted as both a social crystallization point and as
an icon, as a focal point for throngs of mourners and as a cipher for
the democratization movement as a whole. It thus became a target of
aggression by those who fear the power of images. CW
Portrait of Han-yeol Lee, 1987
Drawings, paintings, and truck, dimensions variable
68
RABIH MROUÉ
(b. 1967 Beirut, Lebanon) Rabih
Mroué’s work in theater, performance, and
video is concerned with the political and sectarian conflicts in his native
Lebanon, particularly as they were enacted during the Lebanese civil
war (1975-1990). His video On Three Posters (2004) is a reexamination
of a controversial earlier performance work, Three Posters (2000),
which Mroué executed in collaboration with novelist and playwright
Elias Khoury. This earlier work was an examination of three separate
takes of a video made of Jamal Sati, a fighter in the military wing of
the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), in which he announces his future
martyrdom in a suicide bombing that he will conduct against Israeli
occupying forces in Southern Lebanon. Unearthed in 1999, fourteen
years after Sati carried out his mission and the final edit of the tapes
aired on Lebanese television, the uncut rehearsal tapes show his subtle
mistakes, corrections, and adjustments of tone, diction, and wording. In
the original performance, Mroué screened these three unedited tapes,
bookended by three similar martyrdom announcements performed by
Mroué himself, which were broadcast to the audience via live television
feed, and a prerecorded interview with Elias Attallah, a leading figure in
the LCP who was responsible for Sati’s mission. In Mroué’s reexamination
of his earlier performance, he investigates the manner in which Sati’s
videos blur the boundary between representation and reality, life and
death, as well as the way in which his actions, and the actions of the LCP
as a whole, have been recontextualized in light of the failure of the Left
in Lebanon and Palestine and the adoption of their tactics by radical
Islamists. CW
On Three Posters, 2004
Video, 18:00
69
 JEAN FAUTRIER
(b. 1898 Paris, France; d. 1964 Châtenay-Malabry, France) Jean
Fautrier’s near-abstract
paintings of nudes, animal carcasses, and landscapes evoke a world
of darkness and violence. His Hostages paintings (Les Otages) refer
specifically to the Nazi atrocities of World War II—when Fautrier is
reputed to have overheard the cries of people tortured and executed
by the Nazis from his studio on the outskirts of Paris—but are also
intended as universal representations of the victims of war.
Born in Paris in 1898, Fautrier spent his formative years in London where
he studied at the Royal Academy. After serving in the French army for
three years (1917-1920), Fautrier began his career as a painter. His
oeuvre has been difficult to classify because he often worked in isolation
from the major schools of painting, but his distress over the outbreak
of WWII pushed his painting style in a darker and more aggressive
direction. In the 1940s, Fautrier invented a new process of painting,
replacing traditional oil paint with a haute pâte (high paste) technique,
which involved applying a thick handmade plaster or impasto to paper
mounted on canvas, as in the Hostages series. Exhibited for the first
time in 1945, directly after the war’s end, the twisted and pockmarked
sculptural busts and torturously rendered canvases of disembodied
heads of the Hostages were immediately recognized for their importance
as both a deeply personal attempt to come to grips with atrocity and as
a form of public memorial and testimony. CW
Otage, 1943
Mixed media, 46 x 38 cm
70
THOMAS HIRSCHHORN
Thomas Hirschhorn is best known for his sprawling
(b. 1957 Bern, Switzerland)
installations and provisional structures, which he constructs using
a signature repertoire of such quotidian materials as packing tape,
fluorescent lights, cardboard, and mannequin parts. Bracingly raw
and confrontational, his works often incorporate violent images of the
ravages of war—exploded bodies, severed heads, charred and mangled
remains—that are largely kept from the public eye. Embedded Fetish
(2006) is one such work, for which Hirschhorn has gathered a series
of graphic images of the victims of suicide bombings and paired them
with a collection of mannequin heads bristling with screws. Given
the context, the tortured heads immediately recall the grisly wounds
inflicted by bomb shrapnel, especially since bombs used in suicide
attacks and in IEDs (improvised explosive devices) are often packed
with ball bearings, nails, and screws. At the same time, the heads also
recall Kongolese nail fetishes—magically charged wooden sculptures
into which nails were driven in order to cure or ward off evil. As such,
Hirschhorn’s piece takes on a double meaning: it is simultaneously a
collection of sorrows, a memorial to bodies shattered by conflict, and a
grouping of modern-day idols that attempt, perhaps in vain, to ward off
further violence and salve the wounds of war. CW
Embedded Fetish, 2006
Wood, adhesive tape, screws, nails, printed matter,
painted mannequin heads, 420 x 875 x 40 cm
71
 USEFUL PHOTOGRAPHY
(Edited by Hans Aarsman, Claudie de Cleen, Julian Germain, Erik Kessels, Hans van der Meer,
Useful Photography, a periodic publication
Photographs by Ad van Denderen)
put out by the KesselsKramer publishing initiative, collects and
recontextualizes images sourced from a wide variety of corners of the
contemporary image culture, both obscure and commonplace. Issues
have included a collection of images taken from online auction websites
(#002), photographs of missing persons taken from the archives of the
National Missing Persons Helpline (#003), and a collection of images
from photographic training manuals that show fledgling photographers’
common photographic “mistakes” (#009). Each of these idiosyncratic
typologies asks us to look at images that we might otherwise overlook,
or see as merely utilitarian, and view them in a new light, not merely as
curiosities of visual culture, but as a vital and unexplored facet of it.
For the fourth issue, the editors of Useful Photography collected
images taken by Dutch photojournalist Ad van Denderen of posters
made by Palestinian activists in the West Bank. The posters contain
portraits of the dead—suicide bombers, militants, Intifada fighters,
and bystanders killed in the conflict. They act as memorials and serve
to glorify the dead, fuelling the anger and furthering the Palestinian
cause. This iconography, unlike traditional forms of martyr imagery,
fulfills its purpose though its startling plentitude. Pasted on buildings
and walls in public spaces, and remaining only until they are covered
over or ripped down, the posters shed light on a new form of the
iconography of martyrdom, one that is cheap, distributable, and
relatively immediate. CW
Useful Photography #004, 2004
Photographs by Ad van Denderen
Inkjet prints, 45 x 60 cm each
72
HITO STEYERL
(b. 1966 Munich, Germany) Hito
Steyerl’s film works focus on the use and
circulation of images, particularly the blurring of boundaries between
truth and fiction. Within the hall of mirrors of contemporary image
culture, Steyerl points out that the fictional image has just as much
power to shape the real as the real image has to shape the fictional.
November (2004) creates a complex portrait of Steyerl’s childhood
friend, Andrea Wolf, who, as an adult, was executed by the Turkish
government for her supposedly terroristic activities as a member of the
PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). At the beginning of the video, Steyerl
presents a series of fight scenes taken from an unfinished film starring
herself and Andrea, which they made together as teenagers. This early
film shows the duo adopting the poses of radical feminist outlaws,
which they had cobbled together from Russ Meyer-style exploitation
movies and martial arts films. Later, the poses would translate into
Andrea’s real life, as she became a martial arts-trained militant in
Turkey—a fiction that became reality. After Andrea’s death, yet another
layer of ambiguity is added to the protean picture of Steyerl’s lost
friend: believed to have been unjustly murdered, Andrea becomes
a martyr for the PKK cause, her image gracing placards at protests
and rallies across the globe. With this transformation, Andrea has
completed a strange cycle, from image to reality and back again. As
Steyerl observes: “First we picked up and processed traveling images,
global icons of resistance. Then Andrea became herself a traveling
image, wandering over the globe. An image passed on from hand to
hand, copied and reproduced by printing presses, video recorders and
the Internet.” CW
November, 2004
Video, 25:00
73
 KATHARINA FRITSCH
(b. 1956 Essen, Germany) By
enlarging, replicating, arranging, and color-coding
social objects both sacred and secular, Katharina Fritsch activates their
latent psychological resonances, hidden associations, and art-historical
trajectories. Her works replicate the familiar in a haunted, unfamiliar
way, often using cast polyester resin and solid acrylic colors to
mediate or charge our sense of connection to a common form. Fritsch’s
contribution to Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1987—a life-size figure of
the Virgin Mary, painted a loud shade of bright yellow and erected on
a pedestrian street—provoked harsh reactions, and was defaced with
graffiti over the course of its installation.
St. Katharina and 2nd Photo (Ivy) (2006-2007) depicts the martyred
saint with customary symbolism, clutching a group of lilies and wearing
a crown of thorns, but painted entirely over in a dense, matte black.
Posed in front of a blue silkscreened image of ivy leaves and without
a pedestal, the saint stands face to face with the viewer, an unusual
position for religious statuary. This juxtaposition produces a host of
relationships: between the author and her namesake, the sculpture and
the image, the icon and its historical narratives, and the viewer’s direct
encounter with a religious figure. By setting up an engagement between
viewer and icon at a known, intimate scale, Fritsch allows the humanity
embedded in the icon to emerge. At the same time, by shrouding the
figure completely in black, St. Katharina regains an air of mystery,
further complicating the work’s internal tensions between human, icon,
and living image. BT
St. Katharina and 2nd Photo (Ivy), 2006-2007
Polyester, acrylic, and oil-based ink and acrylic on plastic panel
Sculpture: 168 x 38 x 33 cm, Silkscreen: 280 x 400 cm
74
SERGEY ZARVA
(b. 1973 Kivol Rog, Ukraine) Sergey
Zarva’s work melds the traditions of Social
Realism and expressionism to examine the legacy of Communist rule
in Russia. Zarva often creates his works by painting over documents
from the Soviet Era, transforming them into deformed versions of their
former selves. Zarva first employed this strategy using a collection
of his own family’s photographs, which he altered to create a mutant
family album that evoked life in the Soviet Union, and the often-
obscured pathologies of familial relationships. For his next series
of overpainted works, Zarva turned to a collection of mid-twentieth
century covers of the illustrated magazine Ogoniok, one of the oldest
weekly magazines in Russia. In Zarva’s hands, the cover photographs
of the much-beloved magazine are distorted into expressionistic
grotesqueries—the faces of politicians and peasants alike are molded
through Zarva’s overpainting to become twisted, bruised, and vaguely
simian. Thus transformed, the covers of Ogoniok—once a banal and
reassuring presence in Soviet life—evoke a dark fantasy world. Like
Zarva’s work with his family’s photographs, this series strives to
summon the realities of life under Soviet rule that were glossed over in
Ogoniok’s pleasant photographic platitudes, and to hint, perhaps, at
the ugly realities of the human soul. CW
Ogonyok, 2001
Mixed media on paper, 34 x 24 cm each
75
 PAUL FUSCO
(b. 1930 Leominster, U.S.A.) Paul
Fusco first gained experience as a
photographer while serving in the United States Army Signal Corps in
Korea from 1951-1953. After the war, Fusco studied photojournalism
at Ohio University, and then moved to New York where he was hired
as a staff photographer for LOOK magazine. During his time at LOOK,
he traveled widely for photographic assignments at home and abroad,
photographing to raise awareness of the lives of the people he
documented, from impoverished coal miners in Kentucky, rural life in the
American south, to people living in countries along the length of the “Iron
Curtain.” He joined Magnum Photos in 1973.
In 1968, LOOK sent Fusco on assignment to cover the funeral of Robert
F. Kennedy after he was assassinated. Fusco covered every aspect of
the funeral, from the requiem mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New
York to Kennedy’s eventual burial in Arlington National Cemetery in
Virginia. But Fusco made his most iconic photographs during the train
ride that ferried Kennedy’s body from New York to Virginia and provided
thousands of Americans along the train’s route with an impromptu venue
to express their grief. Taken from the moving train, Fusco’s photographs
capture fleeting glimpses of a public in shock at the loss of yet another
public figure in a string of high-profile assassinations that marred the
turbulent 1960s, a decade in which the newly pervasive presence of the
mass media wielded the power to transform people into icons, making it
all the more difficult to accept their untimely, violent deaths. CW
Untitled, from RFK Funeral Train Rediscovered, 1968
C-print, 46 x 69 cm
76
LEANDRO KATZ
(b. 1938 Buenos Aires, Argentina) The
day after Ernesto “Che” Guevara was
executed by Bolivian soldiers commanded by General Rene Barrientos—
who Guevara and a group of loyal guerilla fighters had been trying
to overthrow—members of the Barrientos government held a press
conference to prove Guevara’s death, permitting a small cadre of
reporters and photojournalists to view his body. Among those present
was photojournalist Freddy Alborta, whose photograph of Guevara’s
body would become instantly iconic, published in newspapers and
magazines around the world and quickly compared by eminent British
art historian John Berger to both Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of
Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) and Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation Over the
Dead Christ (ca. 1480).
Produced just over thirty years after Guevara’s death, Leandro Katz’s
film El Día Que Me Quieras (The Day You’ll Love Me, 1997) is an
extended meditation on Alborta’s famous image, as well as a lament
for the loss of the revolutionary figure that it depicts. Centered on
an interview that Katz conducted with Alborta, the film explores the
strange process of making the final image of a legendary figure.
Guevara’s fame and the sensitivity with which Alborta photographed
his body combined to create a photograph that leads a double life: it
is an image that is both an endpoint, in that it depicted the death of a
man, and a kind of beginning, in that it adds yet another layer to the
image of that man in the public consciousness. Far from being a mere
bureaucratic formality, for many Alborta’s photograph became an icon
of Guevara’s martyrdom. CW
El Dia Que Me Quieras
(The Day You’ll Love me), 1997
Video, 30:00
77
 CARL ANDRE
(b. 1935 Quincy, U.S.A.) Carl
Andre is a pioneering Minimalist sculptor, known
for his gridded, modular arrangements of materials, which often lay flat
on the gallery floor. His pared-down works take up industrial materials
and processes to create sculptural forms that directly address the
body of the viewer, either through their sheer physical presence, or in
the manner of symbolic surrogates. Many of his tiled floor pieces are
meant for the viewer to walk across, taking this logic a step further by
engaging the viewer’s body directly. For War & Rumors of War (2002)
Andre has arranged a series of raw timber blocks in a square spiral. The
crude wooden blocks become anthropomorphic stand-ins: perhaps they
are soldiers, arrayed in recondite formation in defense against some
unknown enemy, or steles erected in memory of the dead, as suggested
by the ominous title derived from the Biblical passage, Matthew 24:6.
A more benevolent reading of Andre’s mysterious arrangement is also
possible: a rough mandala or a provisional meditation maze like the one
found on the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France, the piece might also
be seen as a tool to aid in the contemplation of the horrors of war, with
the hopes of avoiding them in the future. CW
War & Rumors of War, 2002
90 Australian hardwood timbers, 90 x 379 x 350 cm overall
78
GU DEXIN
(b. 1962 Beijing, China) Gu
Dexin began his artistic career as a painter and
became highly regarded among fellow painters even though he was not
formally trained. In the 1980s, he became involved with the Chinese
avant-garde groups Stars Group and No Name. However, in the mid-
1980s, Gu abandoned painting in favor of the creation of elaborate
installation works that incorporated symbolically charged and non-
traditional materials such as plastics, raw meat, bananas, and even
pig brains. Gu is notoriously averse to providing explanations of his
works, but the dueling themes of artificiality and decay suggest that
his primary goal is to mount a critique of contemporary society. Gu’s
2009–05–02 (2009), which takes its title from the opening date of
the exhibition for which it was conceived, is a case in point. The work
consists of a row of painted panels that encircle the gallery, written in
blood-red paint the Chinese characters exclaim, “WE KILLED HUMANS
WE KILLED MEN WE KILLED WOMEN WE KILLED THE OLD WE KILLED THE
KIDS WE ATE HUMANS WE ATE HUMAN HEARTS. WE BEAT PEOPLE UNTIL
THEY TURNED BLIND. WE SMASHED PEOPLE’S FACES.” The aggressive
brutality of the text suggests a sense of societal dissimulation that is
only hinted at in his earlier works, implying that violence, brutality, and
death lurk behind society’s pleasant façade. 2009–05–02 is the last
work of Gu’s career; in what can be read as a gesture of quiet protest,
Gu has consciously withdrawn from the art world and ceased making
art, refusing to add new images to a world already filled with them. CW
2009-05-02, 2009
Wooden panels, red lacquer, dimensions variable
79
 TUOL SLENG PRISON PHOTOGRAPHS
(1975-1979) From1975 to 1979, over fourteen thousand people were
tortured and executed by the Khmer Rouge in and around a former high
school in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which was converted into a detention
center and renamed Tuol Sleng Prison soon after the end of the 1975
civil war. Entrance to the prison, which was known primarily by the code
name S-21, for Security Prison 21, was effectively a death sentence—of
the thousands who passed through its doors, only twelve inmates are
known to have survived. Before their execution, each prisoner was
forced to confess to a litany of imagined offences against the Khmer
Rouge—often extracted by means of torture—in order to legitimate their
punishment in the eyes of the regime’s bureaucracy. Prisoners were also
forced to implicate friends, family, and co-workers, who would then be
rounded up and subjected to similar interrogation.
Upon admission to Tuol Sleng Prison, the prisoners were photographed
for the Khmer Rouge’s records by sixteen year-old Nhem Ein, the
prison’s “photographer in chief.” When the Vietnamese army liberated
the prison in 1979, they discovered over six thousand negatives,
most of which depicted the incoming prisoners posed, mug shot-style,
against a white background with numbers pinned to their clothes. In
1994, American photojournalists Doug Niven and Chris Riley selected
approximately one hundred of the negatives for publication in the book
The Killing Fields (1996). Their efforts brought wide attention to the
photographs, a small selection of which were subsequently presented at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The ethical complexity of these
images makes such presentations difficult as some critics object to
their inclusion in art exhibitions. The concern that such images will be
viewed as art and that their historical context will be obscured is largely
misplaced: although they are documents of the Khmer Rouge’s brutal
campaign of genocide, the images radiate a potent sense of their
subjects’ suffering in the face of unspeakable injustice. In spite of
their original purpose, these images stand as testimony to the lives
and the deaths of these prisoners, and have become poignant, though
inadvertent, memorials. CW
Unidentified Prisoners, S-21 Prison,
Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 1975-79
80
GUSTAV METZGER
(b. 1926 Nuremberg, Germany) Born
into a Polish-Jewish family in Nuremberg,
Germany, Gustav Metzger was taken to Britain in the late 1930s under
the auspices of the Refugee Children’s Movement (Kindertransport),
a rescue effort undertaken by the British government to extricate
thousands of predominantly Jewish children from Germany and German-
occupied territories on the eve of WWII. Both of Metzger’s parents
and a number of his relatives perished during the war, and since that
time Metzger has lived in exile in London, where he has worked as both
an activist and a producer of politically incendiary artworks. Metzger
was also the founder of the loosely organized Auto-Destructive Art
movement, whose first symposium in 1966 counted artists Jonathan
Latham, Yoko Ono, and Hermann Nitsch among its participants.
For his ongoing series Historic Photographs (1994- ), Metzger creates
enlargements of images related to various historical traumas, to which
he adds sculptural elements that force the viewer to engage physically
with the images. For example, To Crawl Into—Anschluss, Vienna, March
1938 (1996) consists of a monumental enlargement of a photograph
of Austrian Jews being forced to scrub down a city street in front of
a crowd of jeering onlookers, which Metzger has laid on the floor and
covered with a tarp. In order to see the image, the viewer must crawl
under the tarp, and directly across the surface of the image, as though
one of the condemned street-scrubbers, or on a penitent pilgrimage. CW
Historic Photographs: No. 1:
Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 19-28 1943, 1995/2009
Photograph mounted on Foamex board and rubble, 150 x 211 cm
81
 LIU WEI
(b. 1965 Beijing, China) An
independent filmmaker living and working in
Beijing, Liu Wei graduated from the China Central Academy of
Drama in 1992 and completed his studies in Philosophy at Beijing
University in 1995. One of Liu’s key concerns is the tension between
the politicization of cultural memory and the tangible sensations of
personal experience, particularly in today’s rapidly changing China.
Two recent video projects, both dealing with the 1989 Tiananmen
Square uprising, have addressed the collapse of public memory in
the face of state power. In A Day to Remember, the artist approached
people in Tiananmen Square and at Beijing University on June 4th,
2005, asking them if they knew what day it was. It was the anniversary
of the incident, but everyone he spoke to either gave evasive answers
or declined to comment. In Unforgettable Memory (2009), Liu again
adopted the tactic of the documentary film interview, this time showing
people a copy of the iconic photograph of the man standing in front of
a line of army tanks in Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989. Again, Liu
is met with resistance: no one wants to talk with him, either because
they refuse to discuss taboo political topics or because censorship
in China has erased this image from history. Liu finds a lacuna in
the public consciousness, one that doesn’t comport with archival
documents, images, personal histories, and graves of the victims. A
muted critique of officially enforced history, the work ruefully admits
that no resolution is possible: “People’s memory turns into a vacuum.
The bygones are twisted into a blurred picture: true memory is gone,
illusion remains.” BT
Unforgettable Memory, 2009
Video, 12:45
82
EYE GLASS SHOP
(Se-Ra Park, JI-Yeon Yi, Jin-A Cha, b. 1984, 1983, 1983 Seoul, South Korea) Eye
Glass Shop
is a South Korean artists’ collective whose members—Se-Ra Park, Yi-Ji
Yeon, and Jin-A Cha—create collaborative works that attempt to both
fuse and juxtapose their distinct points of view. Their practice begins
with a set of constraints, rules, or instructions that are formulated
collectively, but which are then executed by each artist individually. As
a result, each of their projects is composed of three unique vantage
points on the same overarching endeavor—like a story retold by three
different participants in the same event, the plot stays the same, but
the details often vary widely.
For the Biennale, Eye Glass Shop has been commissioned to expand on
a previous project in which each member of the group created diaristic
lists of the events of their lives for a period of one week. For this new
work, the overall strategy remains the same—each artist has set out
to create a portrait of her life through the accumulation of singular
events, actions, and details. However, the timeframe for the project
has been greatly enlarged. The artists of Eye Glass Shop have created
an eight-month portrait of the year-to-date, from January 1, 2010
until just before the opening of the Biennale. Recalling the sprawling,
obsessive works of Hanne Darboven, Eye Glass Shop’s chronicles
straddle the line between writing and drawing, detailing the warp and
weft of three separate lives caught in freeze frame. CW
No Date, No Data, 2010
729 notebook pages, 30 x 21 cm
83
 JONATHAN BOROFSKY
PAUL MCCARTHY
NAYLAND BLAKE
HANS BELLMER CYPRIEN
GAILLARD
JOHN DE ANDREA
HERBERT LIST
ART ORIENTÉ OBJET
EDWARD KIENHOLZ AND
NANCY REDDIN KIENHOLZ
OH YOON MAURIZIO
CATTELAN
KARL SCHENKER
PAUL THEK EMMA KUNZ
TETSUMI KUDO TINO
JOHN MILLER SEHGAL

BERLINDE DE
BRUYCKERE
JEFF KOONS
BRUCE NAUMAN
ZHANG
LAURIE SIMMONS
ENLI
JACQUES CHARLIER

DUANE MATT TONG

HANSON MULLICAN BINGXUE

YASMINE BONGKYU
KABIR KANG
KOKDU
DOLLS
ANNA LIU
ARTAKER ZHENG

YDESSA HENDELES
HERMANN
(TEDDY BEAR PROJECT)
GLÖCKNER

KAN
XUAN
JAMES LEE
BYARS

YDESSA HENDELES
(TEDDY BEAR PROJECT)
JAMES YANGAH
CASTLE HAM

SEUNGTAEK
LEE

JEAN-FRÉDÉRIC
SCHNYDER
TOM HOLERT
HARUN
FAROCKI

HUANG YONG PING

84 BIENNALE HALL
85 . GALLERY 4
 KAN XUAN (see p50) JEAN-FRÉDÉRIC SCHNYDER

(b. 1945 Basel, Switzerland) Jean-Frédéric

Schnyder works in a wide variety of
media—painting, sculpture, woven tapestry, drawing, photography—to
create artworks that engage with banality, kitsch, and the everyday
using styles borrowed from outsider and folk art practice, as well as
the decorative arts traditions of his native Switzerland. Schnyder
often creates work in large thematic groupings, adding weight to the
otherwise banal subject matter though the insistence of repetition. In
the past, Schnyder has created series’ comprised of baby carriages
made out of walnuts (Little Baby Carriages, 2004-2005), dancing mice
(Thirteen Dancing Mice, 1978), ninety paintings of the interiors of
Or Everything, 2005
Video train station waiting rooms (Waiting Rooms, 1988-1990), more than
one thousand photographs of two relatively featureless Swiss streets
(Baarerstrasse/ Zugerstrasse, 1999-2000), among many others.

HARUN FAROCKI (see p56) Schnyder’s 1987 self-portrait, Stigma, is a kind of folk art reimagining
of Albrecht Dürer’s much earlier Self-portrait (1500), in which he
depicted himself as a Christ-like figure. Here, Schnyder has retained
the religious connotations of Dürer’s painting, depicting his hands
raised to the viewer as if to expose the (absent) stigmata alluded to in
the work’s title, but has imbued it with added comedic pathos. Unlike
the young and lordly Dürer, Schnyder appears before us frail, naked,
and unidealized, an icon of human fallibility and mortality. CW

Transmission, 2007
Video, 43:00

BRUCE NAUMAN (see p9)

Hanging Heads #5 (Pink Andrew with Plug/Yellow

Rinde, Mouth Closed), 1989 Stigma, 1987
Dental wax, wood, hanging wire, 31 x 15 x 15 cm Oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm

86 87
 SEUNGTAEK LEE
(b. 1932 Kowon, Korea) Seungtaek
Lee’s sculptures and environmental
interventions take their inspiration from elemental natural forces,
as well as libidinal drives and bodily processes. Much of his work
in environmental intervention, which shares a kinship with both
American Land Art and Korean shamanic traditions, embraces chance
and ephemerality in its attempts to form a collaborative partnership
with natural phenomena such as fire, water, wind and smoke, each of
which Lee has made the subject of a series of works. In addition to
these elemental works, Lee has also intervened in the landscape to
create massive, painterly abstractions that employ watercolor, moss,
and a host of other materials to transform the land into a canvas. In
a series of works that he dubs “provocations,” Lee turns the focus of
his examinations of the natural away from the landscape and towards
the bodies that inhabit it, creating works made out of human hair, and
sculptures that sprout giant sexual organs.
In the monumental, double self-portrait The Artist To Be Out of Breath
(1991), Lee has bound together bales of old clothes into spindly, multi-
limbed armatures that sprout two massive, scowling heads. These
twisted, body-like arrangements are displayed sprawled out on the floor,
as if suffering from exhaustion, and are tenuously connected by a length
of black and white checked wooden beam, something of a signature for
Lee. At first, this tortured array seems suggestive of two warring sides of
the artist’s personality that have managed to reach a fragile equilibrium.
Lee’s larger output from this period deals in large part with the division
of Korea, and the representation of a divided self can be read as an
allegory of a state torn apart by war and ideological differences. CW
Stone Buddha Wearing Ringer Necklace, 1968
Painting on Photograph, 200 cm x 160 cm
88
HUANG YONG PING
(b. 1954 Xiamen, China) Having
founded the Xiamen Dada group in the early
1980s, Huang Yong Ping left China for Paris in 1989 to participate in
the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre. The Tiananmen Square massacre
occurred while Huang was in Europe, where he decided to remain.
Originally a painter and performance artist, Huang’s work in recent
decades has tended toward epically-scaled sculpture, employing
skeletons, wood, sand, and even live animals in elaborate installations
that often derive from contemporary political events and ancient
Chinese ritual forms.
In Huang’s Intestine of the Buddha (2006), a statue of the Buddha sits
at the back of the room, characteristically smiling, while a group of five
taxidermied vultures tear out and eat his intestines. Simultaneously
recalling the mythic trials of Prometheus and the very real destruction
of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001 (which
Huang has elsewhere dealt with more explicitly), Intestine of the
Buddha is fundamentally iconoclastic: the image of the Buddha is
stripped of its enlightenment and made flesh, in effect turning the icon
into a magically-real version of what it once signified. But the icon’s
newfound humanity is under attack by the stuffed vultures that, in
death, have found a second life as the agents of imaginary narrative. BT
Intestine of the Buddha, 2006
Wood, silk and 5 taxidermied vultures, 168 x 400 x 780 cm
89
 YDESSA HENDELES
(b. 1948 Marburg, Germany) Ydessa
Hendeles has cross-woven the roles of
curator and collector, expanding their definitions to include artistic
practice in her unique blend of curating and collecting as artwork.
Hendeles’s large-scale exhibitions involve a lengthy research process
and advance specific, idiosyncratic theses. Staged at the Ydessa
Hendeles Art Foundation in Toronto, Canada, these exhibitions feature
work from Hendeles’s own collection, and much of the preparatory
labor for a given show includes scouting out and purchasing the works
to be included.
For Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), Hendeles collected, over a
period of years, more than 3,000 photographs of teddy bears dating
from roughly 1900-1940. These photographs are presented in a floor-
to-ceiling, two-storey installation designed to evoke a library or
archive room. The images are arranged in categories that reflect the
peculiar ubiquity of the teddy bear as a symbolic object: children,
men and women, soldiers, and elderly people holding teddy bears,
people dressed up as teddy bears, or teddy bears in the background
of significant social moments. First shown in Toronto in 2002-2003,
Partners (The Teddy Bear Project) later traveled to the Haus der Kunst
in Munich and the National Gallery of Canada. In 2009, Hendeles
finished her PhD dissertation in art history at the University of
Amsterdam, framing the critical and curatorial context around Partners
(The Teddy Bear Project). Beloved and invested with emotional, familial
relationships, and subject to the very real political and historical
forces of their time, these teddy bears transcend their status as
transitional objects and become totems: images encoding the actual
lived experiences of their owners. Living and dying along with them, yet
persisting as resonant objects, these bears have become metaphors
for the functioning of images themselves. BT
Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), 2002
90
TOM HOLERT
(b. 1962 Hamburg, Germany) For
years, art historian and cultural critic Tom
Holert has collected pictures of people carrying pictures, primarily
sourced from news media coverage of protests, rallies, and memorial
gatherings. As Holert points out, in an era of digitization, these
images “may seem archaic in that they emphatically, even fetishistically
highlight the objecthood and materiality of visual objects.” Indeed, the
people in these pictures seem possessed with an ardor for the singular
images they carry in a way that seems antithetical to an image culture
based on flow, flux, and ephemerality. As Holert remarks, “In the image
carriers, the relationship between bodies and images is so evident as
to seem a manifestation of a desire to be seized by the images as one
seizes them.”
It is easy to understand, and even to empathize with the actions of
the bereaved, who clutch images of their loved ones as if they had
the power to bring them back from the dead, or, in some cases, hold
aloft images of the fatal tragedy itself, as if they were offering to
both literally and figuratively bear the weight of the event’s memory.
But the image-bearers that populate rallies and protests are more
complex entities: our understanding of them is wholly contingent on
the functions of the media apparatuses that provide a stage for the
expressions of solidarity that they enact under the banner of their
carried images. In other words, the images held aloft by protestors may
create a sense of visual cohesion between what would otherwise seem
to be a hopelessly atomized agglomeration of individuals. CW
Carrying Pictures, 2010
Video, 11:03
91
 YANGAH HAM
(b. 1968 Seoul, South Korea) YangAh
Ham’s video Adjective Life—Out of Frame
(2007) shows a group of young people playfully interacting with a bust
of a man that has been carved out of chocolate. They caress it, pose
with it, lick it, kiss it, scratch it, and eat it. They treat it like a sacred
thing—as if it contained the power to heal them, absolve them of
blame or sin, or bring them exultation. Like the statue of Saint Peter in
Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, whose foot pilgrims touch or kiss
to gain indulgences from the church, or a Kongolese nail fetish that
enacts its power by way of sympathetic magic, Ham’s bust seems to
harbor secret powers that speak to a life beyond its material existence.
But its material (chocolate) is imbued with significance as well.
Sensuous and, above all, sensual, the chocolate from which the bust is
carved charges it with an erotic energy that spills over the boundaries
of the religious notion of the fetish, and into the psychosexual,
Freudian one.
Given the multi-faceted suggestiveness of Ham’s bust, it is interesting
to note its subject: it is the likeness of an international curator of
contemporary art. This detail renders the piece almost parodic,
transforming the performers’ actions from those of religious devotees
or sexual fetishists into the caricatured actions of artists approaching
one of the contemporary idols of the art market. CW
Adjective Life—Out of Frame, 2007
Video, 6:50
92
JAMES CASTLE
(b. 1899, d. 1977, Garden Valley, U.S.A.) James
Castle was born deaf and mute to a
farming family in rural Idaho. Schooled for only five years, Castle never
learned to read or write, and communicated with his family through a
kind of semi-private rudimentary sign language. Castle’s family was
content to allow him to pursue his passion for making art, which he
developed at a young age. Having no access to traditional art making
materials, Castle began drawing on scraps of paper using a sharpened
stick and ink made by mixing soot from the wood-burning stove with
water or spit. He used string to bind hand-made illustrated books and
sew together rough figures of people and animals made from salvaged
cardboard. As his work progressed, Castle employed linear perspective
to create countless drawings that incorporated aspects of his daily
life. Many of Castle’s painstakingly rendered scenes contain strange
figures—dubbed “friends” by scholars of his work. In addition to his
drawings, Castle also made a large number of cardboard “friends,”
which resemble dolls or even small idols. Whether effigies of people he
encountered or imaginary companions created to stave off the feelings
of isolation, Castle undoubtedly found comfort and companionship in
these lovingly rendered figures and the world of images he created. CW
Untitled, n.d.
Mixed media sculptures, dimensions variable
93
 JAMES LEE BYARS
(b. 1932 Detroit, U.S.A.; d. 1997 Cairo, Egypt) James
Lee Byars combined aspects
of poetry, Buddhism, and mystical philosophy into a multi-faceted
artistic practice. Inspired by an extended stay in Japan from 1958-
1968, and fascinated by the work of Joseph Beuys, Byars produced
sculpture, performance, poetry, paper constructions, and installations.
He combined the sculptural forms of American Minimalism and the
performative public engagement of the Fluxus movement with traditional
Japanese concepts of simplicity, ephemerality, and eternality. The
philosophical tenets of Zen Buddhism and the rigidly compressed
language forms of haikus and koans were his guiding formal examples.
A student of philosophy and literature, he also produced public
readings of Gertrude Stein texts and sculptures based on the theories
of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Byars’s onyx sculptures, The Figure of Question is in the Room, The
Figure of the First Totally Interrogative Philosophy, and The Figure of
the Spherical Text (1987), reference Wittgenstein’s ideas of analytical
philosophy. An homage to Wittgenstein himself, the works continue
Byars’s explorations of death and memorial: the raw stones, sliced
and marbled like slabs of meat, stand upright like human figures. At
the same time, they act as grave-markers or steles—one of the most
fundamental sculptural forms—re-embodying and reanimating lost
lives. BT
The Figure of the First Totally
Interrogative Philosophy, 1987
Onyx, 165 x 60 x 44 cm
94
HERMANN GLÖCKNER
(b. 1889 Cotta, Germany; d. 1987 East Berlin, German Democratic Republic) Hermann
Glöckner
was a painter, sculptor, and assemblage artist who created much of
his artwork in secret, hidden away from the prying eyes of the various
oppressive regimes that held power over his native city of Dresden
for most of his career. After fighting in WWI, Glöckner gravitated
towards the abstract forms and revolutionary politics of the Russian
Constructivists, a prominent aesthetic force in interwar Germany.
Glöckner worked in seclusion for most of WWII, until his house was
destroyed in the Allied bombing in February of 1945, forcing him to
relocate to Loschwitz. After the end of the war, Glöckner continued
to work in secret because the government of the German Democratic
Republic (GDR) forbade abstract formalist practices and allowed only
the state-sanctioned realist art they believed furthered the cause of
socialism.
Beginning in this period and continuing until his death in 1987,
Glöckner focused on creating small sculptural assemblages,
constructed from cast-off materials: bits of string, wood scraps, match
boxes, a tin pitcher, and other detritus. Humble in both material and
size, many of these works were created as maquettes, to be reproduced
at a larger scale with more durable materials when freedom of artistic
expression was once again allowed in East Germany. Unfortunately,
these large-scale works were for the most part never realized, as
Glöckner died two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Though
forbidden to produce the work as he intended, what he left behind are
testaments to the persistence of human creativity—an artistic universe
that fits on a tabletop. CW
Symmetrical Composition, 1977
Montage, pharmaceutical boxes, 7 x 6 x 6 cm
95
 LIU ZHENG
(b. 1969 Wuqiang Hsien, China) When
Liu Zheng began his epic, seven-year
project The Chinese in 1997, he set out to create a portrait of his
native country that would reflect the tumultuous reality of its rapid
modernization. The resulting images fuse the documentary sensibility
that Liu perfected during his six-year tenure as a photojournalist for
the Workers’ Daily newspaper with a poised artistic sensibility that
recalls a wide variety of historical photographic touchstones, ranging
from August Sander’s encyclopedic People of the 20th Century to
Diane Arbus’s stark portraits of social outliers. By turns touching,
acerbic, and disturbing, Liu’s project delves deep into the heart of
the contemporary Chinese condition, and shows that it throbs with a
fractious vitality. The selection for the Biennale focuses on some of his
haunting pictures of wax works, statues, and masked and costumed
figures that crop up periodically throughout The Chinese, as ghostly
reminders of the country’s often traumatic past. Photographs such
as Actors in a Film about the War Against the Japanese (2000) and
Waxwork in the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum (2000) directly
address the scars to the national psyche incurred during the Second
Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), specifically the 1937 massacre of
an estimated 300,000 people in the city of Nanjing. Other works, like
Buddha in Cage, Wutai Mountain, Shanxi Province (1998), Yungang
Grottoes (2002), and Quianling Tomb Stone Figures (1998) depict
mutilated or uprooted statuary and suggest that historical traumas
run even deeper, the scars of which are borne out on China’s ancient
effigies. CW
Buddha in Cage, Wutai Mountain, Shanxi Province,
1998, from the series The Chinese, 1995-2000
Ultra Giclée print on fine art paper, 46 x 46 cm
96
ANNA ARTAKER 
(b. 1976 Vienna, Austria) Anna
Artaker studied philosophy and art in Vienna,
and her practice explores the relationships between photography,
historiography, and representation. In recent projects, she has
re-indexed and re-captioned archival imagery to recuperate and
highlight the roles women played in twentieth century avant-garde
art movements, and made a small textual monument to the list of
inventors and software engineers who worked on Adobe Photoshop,
the now ubiquitous image-processing software. Her film 48 Heads
from the Merkurov Museum (2008) focuses on the work of Soviet
sculptor Sergey Merkurov, who originally trained under Auguste Rodin
in Paris, but found success in Russia producing monumental public
sculptures and death masks of party officials. The Merkurov Museum,
in Gyumri, Armenia, holds a collection of these masks, which includes
the faces of V. I. Lenin, Sergei Eisenstein, Maxim Gorky, and many
Soviet party functionaries, such as Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the
secret police. Death masks are direct, primal images—indeed, they
were first known simply as imago, or images—and have a long cultural
history as mementos, official portraits, or religious objects, and have
a close connection to funerary sculpture. In the nineteenth century,
these wax or plaster casts also played a role in the pseudo-science of
phrenology, as people attempted to deduce broad sociological truths
from physical traits. Artaker connects these twin histories of usage,
filming the state-sanctioned portraits in a manner that highlights their
physiognomic traces. Her technique is borrowed from (and homage to)
the Austrian filmmaker Kurt Kren’s 1937 film 48 Heads from the Szondi-
Test, in which the rapid editing of a similar sequence of expressionless
portraits of psychiatric test-subjects is used to subvert the test’s
loaded meanings. In probing the political, scientific, and historical
possibilities of what a face might reveal, Artaker questions the nature
of images through the image-making mechanism of cinema itself. BT
48 Heads from the Merkurov Museum, 2008
16mm film, 8:00
97
 BONGKYU KANG
(b. 1935 Hwasun, Korea) We
all have an idealized image of a village in
countryside. Though each village is, of course, distinct, they are
linked by familiar scenes, which give village life its texture: an old man
walking on a path between wheat fields; drying persimmons glowing in
sunset light; a mother, in simple clothes, holding her swaddled child; a
curious boy tentatively poking a beehive with a stick; snow falling on
glazed vases. Such visions may be idealized, but they have nonetheless
carved a niche for themselves in the cultural mindset, and have become
a point of pride among rural people who still adhere to traditional ways
of life. Of course, while these well-worn visions of rural life do have a
basis in reality, they are far from a complete picture. In Kang Bongkyu’s
photographs of village life, we are given a glimpse of a existence
populated by shamans, folk entertainers, and stalwart, hardscrabble
people who have had the trials of rural existence etched onto their
wizened faces.
In Kang’s photograph that is included in the Biennale, we see a
simple room that shelters a collection of life’s bare necessities: a
folded dining table, a few threadbare garments, and a pair of meager
sleeping mats. On the wall hangs a collection of photographs, tokens
of remembrance depicting absent family members who have either fled
their hometown for local metropolises, or have been stolen away by
death. The photographs lend Kang’s image a palpable air of melancholy,
speaking not only to the inevitably passing of familial relations, but to
the fading of traditional ways of life. HS
Family, 2007
Gelatin silver print, 120 x 106 cm
98
YASMINE KABIR
(b. Bangladesh) Yasmine
Kabir is an independent filmmaker whose films
focus on social and economic issues in her native Bangladesh. My
Migrant Soul (2000) is a damning indictment of the labor exportation
market in Bangladesh, portrayed through the tragic story of Shahjahan
Babu, for whom the video is also a kind of memorial. In 1993, like over
244,506 other Bangladeshis, Babu went abroad in search of work
so that he could make money to send home to his family. Ferried to
Malaysia with the promise of well paying hotel work, Babu quickly
realizes that he has fallen victim to a criminal labor trafficking
organization. Through anguished audio tapes and letters that Babu
sends to his family, we hear that the organization—handsomely paid
with his widowed mother’s only savings—has stolen his identification
papers and is forcing him and his fellow workers to work backbreaking
construction jobs for little or no pay, under constant threat that they
will be turned over to the notoriously brutal Malaysian police force for
working illegally. Babu’s distraught and impoverished family pleads
with his Bangladeshi handlers for his return, only to be met with
dismissiveness, brutality, and false promises. Informed that her son is
coming home, Babu’s mother keeps vigil at the airport until news of his
death reaches her. Babu died in a Malaysian immigrant internment camp
after being rounded up in a police sweep, two years after he left home.
A portrait of the lives of a family caught up in the nefarious forces of
globalization, Kabir’s film is heartbreaking, and is made all the more so
because the story that she tells is by no means unique. CW
My Migrant Soul, 2000
Video, 34:00
99
 KOKDU FROM THE COLLECTION
OF OCK RANG KIM
(ca. 1890-1940) Kokduare small, carved-wood sculptures, mostly dating
from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, designed to adorn
Korean funeral biers. These highly ornate biers were used to transport
the bodies of the deceased from their villages to the ancestral burial
grounds, which were often located in the mountains. An elaboration
of ancient burial practices, kokdu functioned as talismans to aid the
passage of the deceased from our world to the next. Though the Kokdu
take many forms, including that of birds, plant life, and mythical beasts,
they commonly appear as diminutive, doll-like figures that fall into one
of four basic typological categories: the guide, who leads the deceased
along the route of death and is often rendered so as to appear in
motion; the guard, who protects the deceased from evil spirits and
takes the shape of an armed, goblin-like creature; the caregiver,
who cares for the dead as if they were still alive and which is often a
stationary female figure; and the entertainer, who takes the form of
a musician, clown, or acrobat, and is designed to ease the sadness
elicited by death. Like the biers themselves, the Kokdu were supposed
to be burned after the burial ceremony so they could join the deceased
in the next world. However, due to the cost and labor expended on the
creation of the elaborate biers and their talismanic Kokdu, villagers
began to reuse them. Preserved when their original purpose was to
be destroyed, the Kokdu can be seen to exist in a permanent state of
limbo, frozen in a liminal state between life and death. CW
Kokdu, from the collection of Ock Rang Kim
Carved wood, paint, dimensions variable
100
ZHANG ENLI
(b. 1965 Jilin Province, China) Zhang
Enli’s spare, delicate paintings often
render isolated domestic objects and empty interiors in ethereal veils
of color that lend them a melancholic, haunted air. An almost palpable
sense of human absence pervades even the most fragmentary and
elliptical of Zhang’s paintings. Container (2005), a bone-colored
bathtub seen from above, signals a history of past use, while Trunk
(2006) depicts a perspectivally skewed wooden box with a discomfiting
funerary air, whose awkward contours suggest the psychologically
fraught nature of its potential contents. Even his imploring, fragmented
views of trees and hushed still lives suggest the lingering presence of
someone no longer present.
In Circulez! Il n’y a rien à voir the sense of absence and nostalgia
hinted at in other works is brought to the fore. A combination of
painting and installation, the work features the shadowy outlines of
furniture and objects from Zhang’s former apartment in Shanghai.
The title’s declaration, which translates as “Move along! Nothing to
see here,” is familiar from countless police procedurals. As a result,
Zhang’s shadow apartment takes on the feeling of a crime scene, as if
the ghostly outlines delineated not merely furniture or picture frames
but the outlines of some past trauma. CW
Circulez! Il n’y a rien à voir (with Moshekwa Langa), 2007
Painting installation
101
 DUANE HANSON   MATT MULLICAN
(b. 1925 Alexandria, U.S.A.; d. 1996 Boca Raton, U.S.A.) In
the mid-1960s, sculptor
Duane Hanson began producing extraordinarily realistic human figures
cast in fiberglass and resin, arranged in politically charged tableaux
that came directly from the social upheaval of the times. Back-alley
abortions, racial violence by police, and the war in Vietnam were all
depicted in eerie, frozen detail. The objects were cast directly from live
models, meticulously painted to maintain blemishes and realistically
uneven skin patterns, and dressed with clothes bought from second-
hand shops. Though grouped with the rising tides of Pop art, Hanson
himself professed more admiration for nineteenth century French
realism.
In the 1970s, Hanson’s cast figures became more peaceful, when,
instead of social or political upheaval, Hanson arranged them in scenes
of prosaic, middle American consumerism. Moving his subject matter
toward generically recognizable American “types” (cheerleaders,
tourists, amateur photographers, shop-keepers), Hanson began to
place the works themselves openly in the exhibition space, such that
they often blended in with the crowd. In Flea-Market Vendor (1990),
a large middle-aged woman, dressed for the bright Florida sunshine,
sits calmly in the exhibition space on a folding chair, a bright flower-
print handbag at her side. In this disjunct of exhibition space and
object, Hanson’s life-sized polychrome bronze sculpture reveals its
eeriest self: the piece approaches the aesthetic automata, confusing
audiences when it doesn’t move or react to the crowd, and testing the
psychic space of our recognition of the real. BT
Flea Market Vendor, 1990
Polychromed bronze, life size
102
(b. 1951 Santa Monica, U.S.A.) Matt
Mullican is the center of his own
sprawling, diverse artistic cosmology, which, after some four decades
of production includes drawings, paintings, performances, and
sculptures. In Sleeping Child (1973), a pillow on the gallery floor
supports the “head” of a blank wooden board, projecting a ghostly
image of innocence scuttled by its own construction. Mullican’s broad
artistic research, theoretically focused but physically unwieldy, probes
fundamental questions of representation itself: how much is enough,
what shapes can it take, and whether or not it is even necessary.
Mullican often invents characters and draws them in hypothetical
situations: his ongoing Bulletin Boards series collate massive amounts
of research, photographs, and peripheral drawings to display a complex
flux of scenarios, propositions, conclusions, or consequences. He
has also repeatedly performed under hypnosis, as the main character
at stake in Mullican’s practice is Mullican himself. Indeed, his name,
frequently repainted over the years in propaganda-styled signs,
has itself become a semiotic totem. His work is an endless, self-
produced library, but his compulsion to catalog and analyze objects
and experiences is so extraordinary that it effectively produces its own
form of chaos. BT
Untitled (Doll and Dead Man), 1973
Two gelatin silver prints, 25 x 20 cm each
103
 JEFF KOONS
Jeff Koons is known for his wry, affectionate
(b. 1955 York, U.S.A.)
engagement with popular cultural forms. Though he originally worked
with appropriated objects and documents culled from everyday life
(such as vacuum cleaners, advertisements, and basketballs), in
the 1980s Koons began to employ the help of master craftsmen to
fabricate increasingly luxurious versions of kitsch objects. Cutesy
balloon animals, collectable decorative figurines, topiary sculpture,
an inflatable pool toy—often rendered in larger-than-life size—are all
crafted under Koons’s careful supervision using the finest materials
and the most labor-intensive processes, sometimes over a period
of years. The resulting sculptures are sumptuous to the point of
perfection, creating a pointed sense of aesthetic dissonance between
their references to high and low culture. But for all of their seeming
irony, the sculptures exude an undeniable sense of the artist’s love.
These craft heavy works were first shown concurrently at three
separate commercial galleries under the exhibition title Banality.
Promoted through a series of related ads in major art magazines, Koons
was pictured in elaborate tableaux, as if announcing a high-profile
international product launch rather than an art exhibition. Among
the works was Ushering in Banality (1988), an enlarged decorative
figurine of a prize pig being pushed forward by a little boy and
accompanied on either side by winged cherubs. It is a cloying image,
but one that speaks to a brand of sentimentalism rampant in consumer
culture. It can be seen, like most of Koons’s sculptures, as a kind of
contemporary Golden Calf, placed upon the altar of one of our most
cherished aesthetic positions: banality. CW
Ushering in Banality, 1988
Polychromed wood, 99 x 170 x 89 cm
104
LAURIE SIMMONS
(b. 1949 Long Island, U.S.A.) Since
the 1970s, Laurie Simmons has produced a
large body of photographic work that employs ventriloquist dummies
and puppets as surrogate actors in a dense narrative landscape of
human emotion. Her early work featured miniature puppets set in
domestic interiors, whose aesthetics were culled from popular images
of 1950s American suburbia. Recreating cultural mythologies in doll
sizes, Simmons set her puppets among pastel walls, checkered floor
tiles, and perfect living rooms, subtly implying social and psychic
turmoil by employing typologies of stereotypical American characters
like grim working fathers and cheery, if vacant, housewives. She
repurposed the commercial and artificial aspects of color photography
to amplify the imaginary, fictive dreaminess of her sets and puppets.
Girl Vent Press Shots (1990), a grid of twenty-five appropriated
portraits of female ventriloquists, each with their respective dummies,
reveals and foregrounds the backstage workings of Hollywood’s
fantasy production machine. Throughout her career, Simmons’s practice
has centered around two core themes: the puppet or dummy as a
flexible metaphor for lying and truth telling, and the Pygmalion myth,
where constructed figures can transcend their form and take on human
characteristics and emotions. BT
Girl Vent Press Shots/part II (detail), 1989
C-print, 25 x 20 cm
105
 BERLINDE DE BRUYCKERE
Berlinde De Bruyckere’s sculptures grow out of
(b. 1964 Gent, Belgium)
the sculptural tradition of representations of bodies in fragmented,
twisted, or inchoate states, which stretches back from Hans Bellmer’s
haunted, tangled dolls and Auguste Rodin’s piecemeal bronzes to
Michelangelo’s tortured slaves and the Roman marble of Laocoön and
his sons. De Bruyckere’s earliest mature works, made just after she
graduated from art school, consisted of evocative arrangements of
worn blankets, a material that she began to work with after seeing
images of survivors of the Rwandan genocide swaddled in blankets
in refugee camps. Soon afterwards, she began to add wax casts of
body parts to her melancholy arrangements, transforming them from
metaphorically charged memento mori into visceral embodiments of the
reality of death. In her most recent work, De Bruyckere has employed
wax casting in the creation of twisted, headless figures that seem to
be in states of decay or trauma. Many of these figures even sprout
branch-like appendages, which prop up their hobbled bodies and
threaten to engulf them, victims of some unspeakable, metastasizing
blight still undiscovered by science. In addition to these waxen figures,
De Bruyckere has made works cast from the bodies of horses and
covered in horsehide, cobbled into strange forms that seem mutilated
or shot through with pain. Her child-sized sculpture Pascale (2003-
2004) is wax rendering of a hunched, blue-veined female figure
engulfed in the tangle of her own hair. This delicate, reticent figure
recalls a diminutive Eve, bereft of any means of comfort. CW
Pascale, 2003-2004
Wax, horse hair, epoxy, and wood,
140 x 50 x 45 cm
106
JACQUES CHARLIER
(b. 1939 Liège, Belgium) Intentionally
avoiding a signature style, the Belgian
artist Jacques Charlier has instead cultivated a wide range of artistic
activities: painting, sculpture, installation, written text, works on
paper, music, film, and performance. Maintaining an artistic identity
as a detached observer of the art world’s foibles, Charlier adopts and
adapts various meanings and processes, proudly referring to himself
as a general wholesaler of Belgian humor. His earliest works, from the
1960s, were commissioned photographs of generic urban scenery,
made under official auspices and accompanied by his own text—a move
that signaled both his belief in conceptual practices and his irreverent
critique of them. In the 1980s, Charlier began a series of installations
that tested aesthetic taste by combining extreme ends of divergent
art-historical moments. Making large-scale, faux-Cubist or -Futurist
paintings, Charlier often set them within sculptural tableaux that
suggest strange, fragmented narratives. His installation Tragic Painting
(1991), consists of one large abstract painting, a colorful mass of
swirling shapes, in front of which is a mannequin dressed in a tuxedo.
His bowtie unbuttoned and seeming a bit forlorn, this mannequin holds
a packet of confetti strips and a rifle, out of which it appears he has
just shot a bundle of paper streamers and plastic decorations. Our
host suggests that the party is just now over, his actions frozen in
mute relief. BT
Peinture Tragique, 1991
Oil on canvas, life-size
mannequin, mixed media
107
 JONATHAN BOROFSKY
(b. 1942 Boston, U.S.A.) Jonathan
Borofsky’s human-scaled I Dreamed I Could
Fly (1984-2006) and Chattering Man (1982) are set in relationship
to each other in the Biennale. In I Dreamed I Could Fly, a flying man
dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt is suspended from the ceiling, arms
outstretched in free-fall and chest mysteriously emblazoned with the
number 2887539. Below him is Chattering Man, a simplified, slate-
grey robot automaton who gazes up in awe while its motorized jaw
chatters audibly, left foot etched with the number 2890538. These
numeric codes relate to Borofsky’s personal counting system, which he
began in the late 1960s while forging his space within the percolating
conceptual art movement. The works’ numbers correspond to where,
sequentially, Borofsky was when he produced the idea for the work.
Throughout the past few decades, Borofsky’s massive sculptures of
human figures in the midst of labor or activity have been installed in
numerous public spaces, signaling a perpetual sculptural reminder
of our collective social self-image. Walking to the Sky (2008), a
permanent installation at the Kiturami building in Seoul, South Korea,
consists of a vast, tilted pole, pointing upwards, on which a number
of life-sized figures in casual, everyday dress appear to be walking,
single-file, into the oblivion of heaven. BT
Chattering Man, 1982
Painted wood, aluminum, electric motor, audio system, 213 x 61 x 91 cm
108
PAUL MCCARTHY
Through a vast multiplicity of forms, Paul
(b. 1945 Salt Lake City, U.S.A.)
McCarthy explores the sublimated grotesque of American culture
and mythology. His diverse materials include ketchup, mustard,
chocolate, dolls, and sex toys, and are often employed in conjunction
with photographs, drawings, sculptures, or installations. McCarthy’s
works excavate taboos that undergird vast swaths of popular culture,
which he delightedly harvests and shapes into gleeful and obscene
installations. He initially began making puppets and using dolls as
props for performance works, where they would double for the artist
himself—a gesture of personal displacement that has persisted
throughout his practice. His work Garden Dead Men (1992-1994), a
two-part installation made of latex and foam rubber, shows two men (one
of which is a portrait of the artist) lying prostrate on clinical dissection
tables, face up and pants down, their genitalia and legs bloodied from
their obsessive compulsion to have intercourse with trees. Another of
McCarthy’s works, Children’s Anatomical Educational Figure (ca. 1990),
is a ready-made children’s toy—a stuffed human model complete with
removable internal organs—so in line with his thinking that McCarthy
has appropriated it as his own. One of McCarthy’s core gestures, which
emerged in his more recent works, is to enlarge everyday objects to
spectacular, architectural scale: he has produced outdoor, inflatable
sculptures, in the manner of children’s toys, of copulating animals,
Santa Claus holding sexual aids, condiment bottles, piles of excrement,
and the collapsed head of George W. Bush. McCarthy sets images in
motion through a chain of psychological and cultural filters: political
and cultural reality generates an impossible psychic image, which is
then rendered as the cartoonishly haunted real. BT
Children’s Anatomical Educational Figure, ca. 1990
Fabric, wool, found object, 173 x 130 x 117 cm
109
 NAYLAND BLAKE
(b. 1960 New York, U.S.A.) Nayland
Blake’s practice encompasses sculpture,
photography, and video work, and revolves around psychically charged
themes such as biracial identity, homosexuality, and the physicality
of the flesh and body. Using widely varied materials—sticks, leather,
furniture, fabric, and sometimes toy bunnies—Blake has produced a
unique body of work that shrewdly upends prejudicial social codes and
customs, while maintaining a taut, austere sculptural aesthetic. Feeder
2 (1998) was a human-scaled house made of gingerbread on a steel
framework, which was slowly eaten by visitors over the course of the
exhibition. Gorge (1998), a video that accompanied Feeder 2, showed
the artist being steadily fed by another man for an hour. For the
assemblage sculpture Magic (1990-1991), Blake purchased a puppet
at auction from the estate of Wayland Flowers—a flamboyant television
entertainer, puppeteer, and icon of gay American culture—and set it
inside an open box, from which it emerges at the top of a collapsing
mass of dried flowers. Activating the encoded sensation of animate life
that resides within a puppet to gesture toward the life of its author,
Magic is equal parts homage and memorial. BT
Magic, 1990-1991
Mixed media, puppet, 91 x 17 x 23 cm
110
ART ORIENTÉ OBJET
Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin have been
(Established 1991)
collaborating as Art Orienté Objet since 1991. Through images,
sculptures, text, and installations, they reconfigure and reassess the
societal overlap between biology, behavior, science, and aesthetics.
Their work foregrounds concerns with the environment, animal rights,
and social justice, and imports into the museum system a set of social
and political critiques. They have produced a miniaturized dollhouse
cataloging the horrors of animal experimentation, and explored the
experiences of visiting prisoners as a complex gallery installation.
For their project Wire-mesh Surrogate Monkey Mother (1991), they
recreated a landmark behavioral psychology experiment conducted on
rhesus monkeys in the late 1950s by Dr. Harry Harlow, who replaced
a mother monkey with an ersatz simulacrum monkey puppet made of
cloth and wire-mesh to measure the emotional effects. The results were
devastating to the social and mental health of the baby monkeys. Here
this scientific faux-mother is recreated, exorcising the taint of the
experiment and rehabilitating the image-sign of the mother. The work
is displayed along with photographic documentation of the original
experiment, charging the distinction between its past life as science
and its current life as sculpture. BT
Wire-mesh Surrogate Monkey Mother, 1990
Mixed media, 48 x 38 x 30 cm
111
 TETSUMI KUDO  PAUL THEK
(b. 1935 Osaka, Japan; d. 1990 Tokyo, Japan) Coming
of age in a Japan that was
recovering from nuclear attack, and adjusting to a nuclear future,
Tetsumi Kudo produced a wide variety of artworks that probed and
puzzled over human life and social constructions. Though Kudo initially
produced installations and performances, his move to Paris in 1963
spurred a figurative trend in his work, where the body is contorted,
dismembered, and mutated into dense installations that tackle
fundamental ideas like the cultural collision of nature and technology,
while also producing a complex web of psychological associations
surrounding control, victimhood, material culture, sexual drive, and
societal forms of repression. In Kudo’s sculptures, genitals sprout from
a bucket of dirt; a disconnected face feeds itself (with disconnected
hands) inside a brightly colored birdcage; a skull is decorated with
pastel colored yarn and thread. These works derive from Kudo’s
political concerns about postwar Japan: its devastation, exhaustion,
and efforts at rebuilding, and its entwined military relationship to the
United States. But he also grew to articulate a philosophy of a potential
future humanism, one where ecology could accommodate pollution,
and give rise to new forms of animal life and social habits. For L’Amour
(1964), two chairs support two giant, gelatinous, disembodied heads
whose faces and tongues are locked in a luscious, if slightly awkward,
kiss. BT
L’Amour, 1964
Chairs, cotton, plastic, polyester, electrical diagrams, vinyl tubing,
hair, painted wood box, audiotape, 99 x 119 x 58 cm
112
(b. 1933; d. 1988, New York, U.S.A.) The
American artist Paul Thek died in
1988, at the age of 55, leaving behind a complex body of sculpture,
installation, painting and drawing that has proved inspirational for
subsequent generations of artists. Reacting to the prevailing climate
of austere minimalism, Thek sought to insert emotion and flesh back
into the sculptural discourse. In an untitled 1966 piece, Thek encased
a painted wax model of an ancient warrior’s bloodied leg—clad in
a shin-guard and sliced gruesomely above the calf—inside a clear
plexiglas vitrine. In another untitled work, from the series Technological
Reliquaries (1965), Thek placed a wax sculpture of decomposing human
flesh and bone inside a bright yellow plexiglas casing of futuristic,
minimalist design. Much as religious reliquaries safeguard the remains
or talismans of saints, Thek’s sculptures—though dealing in imaginary
lives—cast images within our minds through those same gestures of
collection, preservation, and display. Thek’s other major works include
a suite of bronze sculptures depicting sections of an outdoor fairytale
scene, and an installation of a full-scale, realistically pink-clothed
cast of the artist’s own body, entombed within a large, pink ziggurat.
Presaging a revived discourse after Minimalism that would be infused
with concerns for the pictorial, the human, and the animate, Thek re-
engaged the possibility for sculpture to propose an image, and used
those images to trigger fundamental questions about human life. BT
Untitled from the series Technological Reliquaries, 1965
Metal, formica, wax, 99 x 27 x 65 cm
113
 EDWARD KIENHOLZ AND NANCY REDDIN KIENHOLZ
(b. 1927 Fairfield, U.S.A.; d. 1994 Hope, U.S.A./ b. 1943 Los Angeles, U.S.A.) Raised
on a
dairy farm in Fairfield, Washington, Ed Kienholz emerged as a West
Coast artist in the 1960s with a brusque, muscular style of assemblage,
sculpture, and installations. His works were grounded in a hyper-
masculine sensibility and in Kienholz’s broad range of mechanical
skills. His sculptures (from the 1970s onward made in collaboration
with his wife, Nancy) combined found materials with cast and painted
objects into unruly installations, which traded on multiple aspects of
American culture cut loose from their contexts and in tense collision
with each other. Untrained in fine arts or art history, Kienholz’s forms
derived from his own lexicon of personal citations: farm trucks, military
architecture, Los Angeles car culture, Las Vegas kitsch. In some of his
earlier works, like John Doe (1959) or The Illegal Operation (1962),
human figures had holes ripped open in their bodies and were strapped
to baby carriages; and installations of rotting, domestic interiors
suggested that flesh would stick to the furniture. Later projects
focused on more immersive installations that suggested bleak, discrete
narratives of suburban life. The works were often grotesque: pop
objects were melted, mutilated, or repurposed, and sculptural human
forms were posed in compromised social or sexual positions. Kienholz
intuited and stripped bare the ghastly underside of American life. BT
Hoverman, 1993
Mixed media, 81 x 30 x 25 cm
114
JOHN DE ANDREA
(b. 1941 Denver, U.S.A.) John
De Andrea grew up in Boulder, Colorado and
studied painting at the University of New Mexico. Inspired by a boat-
builder’s casting techniques, he began cultivating his signature version
of hyper-realist, polychrome sculpture. His remarkable technical skill
gives his statuesque sculptures of nude models an extraordinary
semblance to reality. Cast from molds of human body parts, cellulite,
bumps, and wrinkles are all faithfully reproduced. Though De Andrea’s
early works were made of resin and finished with auto-body paint,
in recent years he has perfected a subtle, layered application of
polychrome paints onto bronze casts, producing a hauntingly lifelike
rendering of skin and the sinewy flesh beneath. His works carry the
psychic charge of someone who is alive (just holding their positions in
a perpetual tableau-vivant), until very close inspection reveals its true
nature. But in edging closer and closer to the appearance of the real,
De Andrea tests the strangeness of that sensation, highlighting the
slippage between being and seeming. BT
Katy, 1991
Vinyl, 132 cm high
115
 JOHN MILLER
(b. 1954 Cleveland, U.S.A.) John
Miller’s provocative body of sculpture
engages the question of artistic value, often suggesting a fundamental
transference between the cheap and the expensive, the low and the
high. Miller has made suites of sculptures made of plastic, everyday
objects first glued into freestanding agglomerations and then precisely
gold-leafed by hand. An earlier series of paintings and installations,
The Price is Right, postulated on the sublime infinities embedded in the
visual codes of the television game show (and consumer indoctrination
strategy program). For the piece Mannequin Lover (2002), Miller set a
generic mannequin in the window of the gallery for the run of the show
and had its clothes changed daily by gallery staff, either purchasing
new items for it to wear, or soliciting donations. Mannequin Lover
questioned the role of the artist and the autonomy of the sculptural
object and confused viewers who were unsure whether to look at the
clothes or at the object itself. Side-stepping the array of associations
usually made with mannequins—their haunted, quasi life-like, often
uncanny qualities—Miller locates his usage within a materialist
cultural critique: this mannequin acts more like his corporate brethren,
showcasing the (perhaps) expensively unattainable, and reminding us
of the constant presence of economic transaction. BT
Mannequin Lover, 2002
Mannequin, wig, shoes, 190 x 51 x 35 cm
116
OH YOON
(b. 1946, d. 1986 Busan, South Korea) Oh
Yoon was the leading artist in the
Minjung cultural movement (Minjung means “the people”), an activist
artistic movement that was intimately involved with the broader
democratization movement in South Korea, which formed in response
to the 1980 Gwangju Massacre. Oh, who specialized in sculpture and
printmaking, founded Reality and Utterance, an artist group that
contributed to establishing the theoretical and formal foundation for
Minjung art. His work is renowned for its simple, graphic depiction of
the prototypical subjects of Minjung culture such as laborers, mothers,
dokkebi, farmers, which he rendered in thick, hard-edged lines that he
created with a print knife.
On exhibition in the Biennale is the death mask of Oh’s father Oh
Youngsoo, which the artist made himself soon after his father’s death.
Like his son, Oh’s father shared an abiding affection for the plight
of the common people, and, like his son, expressed this affection
through art, writing novels such as his well-known work The Seashore
Village, which earned him a place among Korea’s most eminent modern
novelists. HS
Death mask of Oh Youngsoo, 1979,
Plaster, life size
117
 HANS BELLMER
(b. 1902 Kattowitz, Germany; d. 1975, Paris, France) Born
in Kattowitz, in the far
reaches of the German empire (now Katowice, Poland), Hans Bellmer
began producing his eerie, disturbing doll works in the early 1930s.
Weaving together his own obsession with a young girl cousin, nostalgia
for childhood toys, and a visit to the opera to see Tales of Hoffmann (in
which the protagonist falls in love with an automaton), Bellmer began
producing interchangeable, ball-jointed doll sculptures and arranging
them in photographic tableaux. By 1934, Bellmer had found a keen
audience in the circle of Parisian Surrealists, and his collection of
photographs of disembodied doll parts awkwardly propped in a number
of disturbing domestic situations was published by André Breton in
the Surrealist journal Minotaure. Grotesque and highly sexualized,
these doll works were a manifest rejoinder to the Nazi obsessions
with physical perfection and Aryan purity, and they resonated with
the Surrealists’ interests in automata and the fear and repulsion
engendered at the sight of the plastic, nearly human, body. After his
wife’s death in 1938, Bellmer settled in Paris, where he spent the rest
of his life making sexually charged drawings, paintings, prints, and
photographs of young girls. BT
La Poupée, 1934
Gelatin silver print, 9 x 6 cm
Ubu Gallery, New York & Galerie Berinson, Berlin
118
KARL SCHENKER
(b. Germany; d. 1951 or 1952, UK) Karl
Schenker became a well-known and
successful photographer during the Weimar Republic, working chiefly
for the popular Berlin women’s magazines Uhu and Die Dame. He
specialized in portraits, images of actors, and fashion photography.
From 1913-1923, Schenker kept a studio on the fashionable street
Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, and remained in the city until 1938, when he
immigrated to London. In these images, taken in 1925, Schenker has
meticulously painted and dressed wax mannequins in preparation for
use in a fashion spread. Fashion was at the forefront of Weimar culture
(in cinema, theater, and media) and—along with the popular idea of the
New Woman—was a mechanism for women’s engagement with the public
sphere. Clothing displays were so common that the word “mannequin”
was interchangeably applied to both these inanimate dummies and to
the real women who modeled outfits for individual clients or fashion
shows. A modern Pygmalion, Schenker here recreates the classic image
of the artist at work with his model, playing on the object’s haunting,
human-like presence. Convincingly life-like, Schenker’s mannequins
also offer a window onto an earlier moment in image making, when
photographic technologies fell short of today’s high-resolution clarity,
and so could mask (or produce) confusion between the living and the
inanimate. BT
Karl Schenker Working on a Wax Shop Window Mannequin, 1925/2004
Gelatin silver print, 28 x 36 cm
119
 HERBERT LIST
(b. 1903 Hamburg, Germany; d. 1975 Munich, Germany) German
photographer Herbert
List has had a profound impact on the postwar visual codes of fashion
photography and gay masculinity. His iconic, 1930s black and white
images of young men, often taken outdoors, combined an avant-garde
visual idiom (starkly modernist compositions, double exposures, and
props such as masks and fabric) with an erotically charged imagination.
List found work in the late 1930s photographing assignments for
Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Life, but was forced to return to Germany
and serve—despite being gay and half-Jewish—in the German
campaign in Norway, as a military cartographer. He returned to
commercial work after the war, under contract with Magnum, though he
focused more on his personal work and took relatively few assignments.
His images of wax models undergoing operations—performed with
brutal surgical tools by other wax figures—were produced at the
end of the war, in 1944. They are disturbing images: a woman seems
to undergo some kind of sanctioned torture as her skull is drilled
(Trepanation); tear ducts are poked with sharp instruments (Surgery
for Squint). Contextualized by their author’s experience during the war
and the haunted spirit of their times, these images provoke a visceral
response for their seeming abstention from moral and humane behavior,
while also conflicting with our core sense of photography’s depiction
of the real. BT
Gorilla Kidnaps a Girl, 1944
Gelatin silver print, 22 x 25 cm
120
CYPRIEN GAILLARD
(b. 1980 Paris, France) Connecting
threads of land art, monumental sculpture,
minimalism, and trespassing, Cyprien Gaillard’s work questions the
trajectories of Modernist architecture and the structuring of public
space. Through videos, paintings, photography, and sculpture, Gaillard
connects the iconography of modernity with Romanticism, provocatively
reviving ideas of ruin, collapse, and loss. In the video Desniansky
Raion (2007), a public light show heralds the implosion of a public
housing block in Meaux, while in the painting series Swiss Ruins (2005),
modernist architecture in Switzerland is transplanted into a new, post-
diluvian landscape, in the style of the seventeenth century ruinist
painters. For the project Dunepark (2009), Gaillard excavated an
intact WWII bunker from a hill overlooking the beach in Scheveningen,
Germany. Once part of the German Atlantic coastal defense system,
the structure was unearthed, opened to the public, and then reburied,
simultaneously connecting the town to its history and its current
situation of gentrification and real-estate speculation.
His new video deals with the relocation of the Nubian Monuments from
Abu Simel to Philae in Egypt in the 1960s, to prevent their destruction
by the flooding of Lake Nasser, a vast reservoir produced by the
Aswan Dam. The ancient rock temples, carved under Ramesses II in the
thirteenth century BCE, were disassembled and moved in their entirety
to a high hilltop. Reconfiguring archival footage and pushing at the
conventions of anthropological films, Gaillard’s work continues his
interests in destruction and iconoclasm as symbols of our location in
history. BT
Cenotaph to 12 Riverford Road, Pollokshaw,
Glasgow 2008, 2008
Recycled concrete and building detritus from
demolished housing estate, 400 x 200 x 200 cm
121
 TINO SEHGAL
(b. 1976 London, UK) Tino
Sehgal’s practice is inspired by his training
in dance and political economy. Executed by rigorously trained
interpreters, who Sehgal instructs especially for each exhibition, the
works take the form of moving tableaux and interactive “constructed
situations,” as Sehgal calls them, during which viewers are asked
to enter into structured discussions with his interpreters on a wide
range of political and philosophical topics. His works share a common
critical tactic of radical dematerialization, which can be seen as both
a political and philosophical gesture in its own right. Rejecting both
photographic and written documentation—the traditional methods
used to preserve performance practice—Sehgal’s works continue for
the entire duration of the exhibition. But they exist only in the time and
space of the exhibition, thereafter circulating in the cultural sphere
only via word of mouth, or secondary written accounts. Thus, Sehgal’s
works are unified by a principled refusal to add objects or images to a
world already supersaturated with both. Sehgal’s Instead of allowing
some things to rise up to your face, dancing bruce and dan and other
things (2000) consists of a single dancer, who writhes around on the
gallery floor in a slow, stylized manner, seeming to mime the effects of
physical or psychic trauma. However, the dancer is in fact reenacting
dance-like gestures from early videos by Bruce Nauman and Dan
Graham, who are alluded to in the work’s title. As a result, the artwork
can be seen as both an homage to these towering artistic figures,
and as a kind of exorcism, a ritual that Sehgal has created in order to
divest himself of the encumbrances of the past and the great burdens
of influence. CW
122
MAURIZIO CATTELAN
Maurizo Cattelan is known as an art world court
(b. 1960 Padova, Italy)
jester, who pokes fun at the foibles of the market and lampoons the
traditionally expected roles of the artist. In the 1993 Venice Biennale,
Cattelan rented out his allotted space to a perfume company, who
put up a large billboard in place of, or perhaps as, his art. His 1996
exhibition in the de Appel Gallery in Amsterdam consisted of the
stolen contents of a nearby gallery, repackaged and entitled Another
Fucking Readymade. Underlying the playful exterior of Cattelan’s
work are darker concerns with death, failure, and despair. Cattelan
is also notably concerned with religious imagery, inherited from his
Catholic upbringing in Italy. Early on, these concerns were manifested
in his controversial work La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) (1999), a
hyper-realistic sculpture of Pope John Paul II being struck down by
a meteorite. A later work, Untitled (2007) consists of a large wooden
crate, into which the figure of a woman, apparently crucified to the
interior, has been secured as though ready for transit as an artwork.
Unlike the traditional icon of the crucified Christ, who faces out
towards the faithful as a reminder of his sacrifice, Cattelan’s figure
is packed with her back to the viewer, as if hiding or in shame. The
protective packaging that girds the figure’s waist and encircles her
hands and ankles suggests a tension between her status as spiritual
relic and art object—carefully and lovingly stored, whether in a church
vault or circulating from exhibition to exhibition. CW
Untitled, 2008,
Silicone resin, clothes, wood,
140 x 140 x 70 cm
123
 EMMA KUNZ
(b. 1892; d. 1963, Brittnau, Switzerland) Emma
Kunz’s elaborately detailed
geometric drawings were not designed to be art. Rather, she created
them to be used as guides in healing rituals, where she would place
the drawings between herself and her patient and use them to divine
energy disruptions. Aware of her artistic and mediumistic abilities from
young age, when she began making drawings in her school notebooks,
Kunz developed an interest in radiesthesia, a divining process that
relies on energy fields. Kunz used a pendulum to guide the creation of
her drawings’ geometries, completing each piece in a single session,
which occasionally lasted over twenty-four hours. Kunz believed that
her drawings were a product of “the most profound interiorization
of the outward and the purest exteriorization of the inward,” which
allowed her to discern negative energy and transform it into healing
energy. As such, Kunz’s drawings are part of a much larger history of
healing images, whose presence or touch are enough to salve wounds
and cure illness, both psychic and physical. What is interesting about
Kunz’s works, however, is that while the history of healing images is
largely entwined with overarching structures of religion and cultural
belief, her images are wholly personal and idiosyncratic, a manifestation
of what she called “a specific system of law, which I feel within me and
which never allows me to rest.” CW
Drawing No. 086, n.d.
Pencil and crayon on white scale paper,
92 x 92 cm
124
PORTRAITS OF YE JINGLU, COLLECTED BY TONG BINGXUE
(Ye Jinglu b. 1880, d. 1968 Fuzhou, China; Tong Bingxue b. 1969 Hebei Province, China) Ye
Jinglu
sat for his first photographic portrait in a London studio in 1901, and
for his second studio portrait in 1907. Thus began an annual ritual
that continued until his death in 1968 and resulted in an impressive,
sixty-two year archive. Looking over a cumulative picture of a life, it is
compelling to pick out the little details that hint at the texture of Ye’s
existence: the playfulness in his warm but otherwise serious-seeming
persona that comes out in a picture of him reading a newspaper (1949)
or pretending to talk on a telephone (1959); the Western suit that
speaks of his time abroad (1909); the haggard look that marks a period
of illness (1961). In one anomalous image from 1952, Ye even chose
to forego a portrait all together, replacing his image with a cutout
silhouette.
In addition to personal changes and Ye’s passion for portraiture,
the pictures reflect changes in photographic styles. While the early
portraits typify the conventions of portrait studio photography of the
nineteenth century, around 1941 they begin to take on a more modern
cast with his first close cropped, head-and-shoulders portrait. The
clear stylistic evolution of photographic portrait conventions adds
another layer of interest to Ye’s archive, making it not only a life
history in images, but also a kind of life history of images themselves.
Discovered by the collector Tong Bingxue, exhibitions of these portraits
raise complex questions about authorship: the photographs can be
seen as a kind of displaced collaboration between the subject, the
anonymous photographers, and the album’s current guardian, whose
efforts have helped to bring this remarkable life chronicle to public
view. CW
From the Album of Ye Jinglu, discovered and
collected by Tong Bingxue, 1901-1968
62 photographs, dimensions variable
125
 TAEKYU PARK

(b. 1965 Hampyeong, South Korea) For

years, Taekyu Park has acted as the only
remaining movie poster painter in Gwangju. Once the predominant
method for advertizing coming cinematic attractions, the vocation of
poster painting has largely fallen victim to the strict standardization of
multi-national cinematic advertizing. However, Park’s enormous, hand-
painted interpretations of promotional material for cinematic releases
ZHOU XIAOHU both new and old still occupy a small, yet significant outpost in the
visual culture of his native city. For the Biennale, Park will exhibit a
series of freestanding lobby placards that tell the history of Korean
cinema, through a selection of what he considers its seminal films. CW

TAEKYU PARK

Memory, 2002
Painting on panel, 180 x 90 x 40 cm

BIENNALE HALL
126 . GALLERY 5 127
 ZHOU XIAOHU

(b. 1960 Changzhou, China) Zhou

Xiaohu’s videos, animations, and paintings
engage with the structures of the mass media, politics, and the culture
ALICE KOK MING WONG
of consumerism. Many of his works employ painstaking stop-motion
animation techniques, breathing life into drawings, clay figures, and
everyday objects. Through these techniques, Zhou is able to construct
complex allegorical works that mix some of the levity of children’s
ANDRO WEKUA
animation with serious socio-political concerns.

JUNG LEE HENRIK OLESEN

In addition to his work in animation, Zhou also produces live action
videos, which nevertheless exhibit the same playful criticality as KWANGHO CHOI
his animated works. His video Concentration Training Camp (2008)
shows a corporate training meeting for the American company Amway
during which something appears to have gone wrong. What aberrance
has occurred is not immediately clear, but all the participants have
KEREN
strained faces, oddly draped clothing, and their hair has a tendency to CYTTER
HYEJEONG CHO
stand on end. Soon, the problem becomes apparent: these corporate
trainees, who are emphatically repeating platitudes about their future
wealth and success, completing trust and team building exercises,
and unburdening themselves about their past hardships, are, in fact,
all suspended from the ceiling of an upside down conference room.
This ridiculous situation comically pairs the absurd money-worship
of corporate Capitalism with its bizarrely topsy-turvy acolytes. This
double absurdity slowly works to reinforce Zhou’s purpose: as the GWANGJU FOLK MUSEUM
video’s vignettes unfold, they form a portrait of a world whose values
have been turned upside down. CW

Concentration Training Camp, 2007-2008

Video, 3:40

JEAN-LUC
GODARD

128 FOLKLORE EDUCATION

129 CENTER
 HENRIK OLESEN
(b.1967 Esbjerg, Denmark) Henrik
Olesen’s work attempts to expand traditional
historical narratives to include discussion of the presence and influence
of gays and lesbians, as well as to expose methods of oppression and
exclusion that have been enacted against them. Olesen has created
projects that attempt to undermine (often playfully) the staunchly
masculine, heterosexual legacies of Minimalism and conceptual art.
Some Faggy Gestures (2008), Olesen’s most ambitious project to date,
is an incomplete history of homosexual and homo-social imagery in
the history of art. For this project, which has been reconfigured and
expanded for the Biennale, Olesen has assembled a huge number of
historically disparate images ranging back as far as the twelfth century,
images that are homo-erotically charged, made by gay artists, or contain
homosexual subtext. Arranged into loose categories (“The Effeminate
Son,” “Dominance,” “The Appearance of Sodomites in Visual Culture”)
or focused around the lives of specific artists (Thomas Eakins, John
Singer Sargent, Anne Seymour Damer, Rosa Bonheur), this project
is reminiscent of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. However, while
Warburg’s work—named after the Greek goddess of memory—formed an
idiosyncratic illustration of the influence of classical antiquity on the
imagery of the Renaissance, Olesen’s archive asks us to remember a
more contentious vein of cultural influence, which many would still wish
us ignore. CW
Some gay-lesbian artists and/or artists relevant to homo-social culture I – VII, 2007
7 collages, wood, 2 padded chickens, 1 padded rooster,
dimensions variable
130
HYEJEONG CHO
(b. 1973 Seoul, South Korea) Hyejeong
Cho’s films blur the boundary between
the private and the public to create highly personal documents that
speak to both her subjective experience and the experiences of society
at large. In her film What They Remember from the Lost (2009) Cho
interweaves impressionistic vignettes pertaining to the memory of one
of her recently deceased friends (footage taken from a trip they took
together, scenes of family and friends in mourning, and, in a gesture
towards possible rebirth, images of a mother languidly breastfeeding
her child) with images of public memorials commemorating the passing
of former President of the Republic of Korea, Roh Moo-Hyun, to create
a complex picture of both personal and societal grief. However, as the
title implies, What They Remember from the Lost is not only designed
as a marker of loss, but also a receptacle for memory. In a globalized
world beset with frantic and frequently frivolous dispatches from
all corners of the media environment, it is easy to acquire a mindset
in which all information—from the trivial to the tragic—becomes
equivalent. Against this deluge of information, Cho’s dream-like and
meditative work attempts to create a bastion of remembrance so that
in our headlong rush towards the ever-quickening future we might not
lose hold of the past. CW
Grand(m)others, 2007
Video, color, sound, 20:00
131
 ANDRO WEKUA
(b. 1977 Sochumi, Georgia) Andro
Wekua creates psychologically charged
sculptures, drawings, and films that he arranges into meticulously
considered environments, simultaneously evoking the surreal and
sometimes frightening world of dreams, and the layered histories of
the visual. Wekua is best known for his work with mannequin-like wax
figures, cast from live models. These mute, enigmatic figures haunt
his oeuvre like ghosts attempting to convey a message that may never
be deciphered. Like much of Wekua’s work they are both giving and
withholding, seemingly clear but ultimately obscure.
Wekua’s recent series of miniature buildings—Hotel Abchasia
(Building 1), Pier (Building 2), High-rise building (Buidling 7),
Steamboat Administration Buidling (Building 4), and Hotel Ritsa
(Building 5)—are models of his childhood hometown of Sochumi,
Georgia, recreated entirely from memory. Wekua’s models are
constructed from the unreliable building blocks of memory itself—
incarnations of recollection rather than its storehouse. Embodying
a traumatic series of events that compelled him to leave Georgia,
Wekua’s subjective memories have produced a model of a personal
landscape rather than an accurate representation of his former
hometown. Though subject to revisions, distortions, and omissions,
this model, for Wekua, is perhaps more real than the place itself. CW
Steamboat Administration Buidling (Building 4), 2010
Wax, metal scaffolding, wood, 39 x 91 x 28 cm
132
KWANGHO CHOI
(b. 1957 Kangreung, South Korea) Kwangho
Choi’s startlingly intimate photographs
from his series My Family tackle grand themes—life, death, intimacy, joy,
and pain. But despite the broad emotional scope of his photographs,
they are never melodramatic, cloying, or clichéd. Rather they are
possessed by a modest yet penetrating rawness and realism that makes
the photographs seem as though they had been torn from the pages of a
private diary—mementos of an ordinary life lived by a passionate, astute
observer. Some pictures are vignettes of the everyday: a grandmother
holding her crying grandchild; a seashell repurposed as an ashtray,
filled with extinguished cigarette butts; a family dinner; a girl knitting.
Others preserve life’s more traditional landmarks: weddings, childbirth,
and family gatherings.
But Choi’s most poignant and disquieting works are those that deal
unflinchingly with the end of life: the process of dying and the rites and
rituals that attend its aftermath. In three particularly affecting series,
Choi has painstakingly documented the final moments of the lives of
some of his elderly relatives. In these sequences, the evacuation of vital
energy from the bodies of Choi’s subjects is almost palpable, and their
terror utterly present. We see their mouths twist in pain, their ravaged
bodies tense, and their faces finally slacken and sag under the weight
of death. They are frightening, disturbing images, both because of what
they depict and the intimacy and frankness with which they depict it.
But, if Choi is to show life in all of its fullness, as he endeavors, they
are images that could hardly have been left out. CW
My Family, 1975-2009
Gelatin silver print,
dimensions variable
133
 JUNG LEE
(b. 1972 Seoul, South Korea) Jung
Lee’s photographic series Clubgenki was
made in a London pub that claimed to offer a place to share the
cultures of East and West; a place for Western men to meet with Asian
women. Born and educated in Korea, when Lee moved to the UK to study
photography she found herself confronting, for the first time, issues of
identity, outsiderness, and cultural stereotyping. For several months,
Lee was a member of this club (genki means “well-being” in Japanese),
but she soon found herself uncomfortable with the dialogues and
meetings between the Asian girls, who spoke broken English, and the
Western men, who cast themselves in dominant positions. Her pictures
show the pub patrons engaged in convivial conversation, but the
peculiarities of its demographics creates an uncomfortable sensation
for the viewer. The men are not here just to meet women—one of the
goals of male bar patrons the world over—but to meet women who
conform to a specific ethnic type. The impression is that the individual
woman is less important than whether or not she conforms to certain
behavioral and physical expectations. Lee’s photographs are ultimately
concerned with the act of looking—the Clubgenki series communicates
the tension and suspense of these interactions with strong cinematic
lighting and emphasis on the gaze itself. In psychoanalytical theory
and cinema studies, we are often reminded that the gaze is inextricably
bound up with notions of desire, objectification, and otherness. Lee’s
pictures make these theoretical notions manifest, exposing them to
scrutiny and criticism. CW
Clubgenki, 2002
C-print, 90 x 120 cm
134
KEREN CYTTER
(b. 1977 Tel Aviv, Israel) Keren
Cytter produces work as a filmmaker, novelist,
and, most recently, as a choreographer for her dance troupe D.I.E. Now
(Dance International Europe Now). Cytter has produced approximately
sixty films in the past ten years, all of which are relatively low budget
productions with casts made up of her friends and acquaintances.
These films, like most of Cytter’s endeavors, are marked by disjointed,
unstable narratives that shift erratically between various genres
and emotional registers and feature characters whose identities are
unstable, which has lead to comparisons with the strategies of the
films of the French New Wave cinema. Like these films, Cytter’s works
are also known for their self-referentiality and use of distancing
techniques, such as intentionally bad acting and the inappropriate use
of music, which serve to remind the audience of the constructed nature
of the work.
For the Biennale, Cytter has created a new film in which a single
narrative evolves simultaneously in four cities: Johannesburg,
Inhambane (Mozambique), Tel Aviv, and Berlin. Hot Days (2010) is
a mocumentary that follows the French colonialist anthropologist
Anne Marie Baptist as she moves from South Africa to Israel in the
nineteenth century. She follows the great legend of South East African
tribes, focusing mainly on the Koi and the San tribes that migrated from
Mozambique to Matsulu and White River (today north of South Africa),
until she finally arrives in Israel. CW
Four Seasons, 2009
Video, 8:00
135
 ALICE KOK
(b. 1978 Macau, China) Alice
Kok’s photographs and videos address cross-
cultural communication in the post-colonial, globalized epoch. The
video installation Family Script (2007) addresses these concerns
quite literally—through the facilitation of international communication
between members of Tibetan families living apart from one another in
India and Tibet. Traveling between the two countries, Kok would record
and deliver video messages sent between the long-separated families
with often touching results. The families sing songs to one another,
send news of new additions to the family, and, on the Indian side, ask
to be sent back images of the small corners of their homeland that
they hold fondly in their memories. Of course, there are inevitably also
tidings of sadness, hardship, and death, but even these are borne with
a resoluteness and dignity that exudes tenderness for the feelings
of the recipients, who are constantly reminded not to worry. Mostly,
there is joy: one woman even exclaims, with an expression that she is
barely able to contain, that seeing her daughter again (through the
video message) has been the happiest day of her long life. Ultimately,
whether they deliver good news or bad, these video missives—shuttled
across vast distances by one intrepid artist—constantly remind us of
the power of images to potently make the absent present, to bring our
loved ones near, no matter how far away they may be. CW
Family Script, 2008
3 channel video, 18:05
136
MING WONG
(b. 1971 Singapore) Ming
Wong works primarily in video, a medium that he
uses to explore the performative aspects of identity and language,
often through restaging and reconfiguring scenes from commercial
motion pictures, with Wong acting each part. Past works have found
him engaging with films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk,
Wong Kar-Wai, and Luchino Visconti, among others, each of which
Wong uses as a starting point for his investigations, which play with
received expectations of racial, cultural and gender roles, and explore
the possibilities and impossibilities of communication.
In Filem-Filem-Filem (2008-2010), Wong expands his exploration of film
to encompass the architecture of cinema—the theaters themselves.
The work is composed of what appears to be a series of Polaroid
photographs of small cinemas (but are, in fact, digital composites of a
number of images of different views of each building) that were built
in colonial Malaysia and Wong’s native Singapore in the 1940s and
50s. The images form a typological study of these eccentric structures,
which were constructed using a grab bag of architectural styles,
ranging from Bauhaus to Art Deco, and customized by local architects
to reflect the tropical climate to create vernacular architectural folies.
However, like the ersatz Polaroids with which the cinemas are depicted,
these former “dream palaces” are now merely leftover husks of an
obsolete form, put out of business by the bland architecture of the
multiplex, abandoned or repurposed as enterprises not in the business
of selling dreams. CW
Filem-Filem-Filem, 2008-2010
Instant color photograph, 9 x 10 cm
137
 JEAN-LUC GODARD
THOM PUCKEY
SEUNGTAEK LEE

(b. 1930 Paris, France) Jean-Luc

Godard was a seminal figure of French New
ROBERTO
Wave cinema of the 1960s and is considered one of the most influential CUOGHI
filmmakers of the twentieth century. Godard’s critical writings first TEHCHING CINDY PAUL RYAN
HSIEH SHERMAN MCCARTHY TRECARTIN RONI
appeared in André Bazin’s influential Cahiers du Cinéma and in his own HORN
MORTON MARIA
journal Gazette du Cinéma, which he founded in 1950 along with fellow BARTLETT LASSNIG
filmmakers Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. In 1960, Godard released
his first feature film, Breathless, which was marked by a unique visual
style that resulted from his pioneering use of discontinuous jump cuts,
as well as by its plentitude of extra-narrative references to earlier NAMJIN LIM

films. Along with Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and
Francois Tuffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), Breathless was instrumental ANDY WARHOL
in bringing international attention to the French New Wave. Godard’s
interest in revolutionary politics is evident in the boundary-breaking DIETER ROTH
feature films he continued to produce for the remainder of 1960s. After
the student uprisings in May 1968, he began to more fervently identify
with Maoism, distancing himself from his previous cinematic output and
creating films that more explicitly addressed the political and social
issues of the day.
PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA

In 1980, he resumed a more narrative style with the release of Sauve

qui peut (la vie). Since this time, he has completed a number of
projects, but none have been more ambitious or storied than his epic,
four-and-a-half hour masterpiece, Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988-1998).
Almost entirely composed of a dizzying array of appropriated footage
and dialogue, with occasional asides in the form of narration and
overlaid text, Histoire(s) du Cinéma is Godard’s frenetic, personalized
account of cinema’s historical entanglement with society, politics, love,
sex, and death, which he ultimately fashions into a critique of twentieth
century history as a whole. CW

Histoire(s) du Cinema, 1998, Video, 4:25:00

138 GWANGJU MUSEUM

139 OF ART
 THOM PUCKEY SEUNGTAEK LEE (see p88)

(b. 1948 Kent, UK) Thom

Puckey’s focused sculptural language produces
images that, while crystallized in sculptural form, persist and flicker
in the mind in the manner of cinema and literature. For the installation
True Light (1989), two mannequins fully dressed in Victorian garb (a
man and woman) stand on a ten-meter long, cruciform shaped platform,
each holding a disc of green or red glass, a physical duality that
directly references Jan van Eyck’s famed Arnolfini Portrait (1434).
Between them, miniature wood marionettes, all dressed in identical
uniforms, mill about with tiny props, while a magnifying glass focuses Artist to Be Out of Breath, 1991
Mixed media, 400 x 200 cm
a small disc of light on the rear panel of the platform. The work
suggests an oblique but imagistic narrative, and even includes a
sculptural rendering of the technology of image production itself—
again, a nod to the complex optical illusions within van Eyck’s portrait.
MARIA LASSNIG (see p23)
Puckey’s more recent marble sculptures are made from live models and
produced in a laborious, classical method of casting and finishing. They
depict disturbing scenes: realistically rendered nude women, posed in
the manner of nineteenth century history paintings, aim and fire brutal-
looking contemporary military technology into an imagined horizon of
space, if not at each other. Collapsing classical studio techniques with
art-historical legacies and contemporary political implications, Puckey
continues to coax from his frozen material a kind of trans-historical
living image. BT

Self-portrait, 1971
Video, 4:30
True Light, 1987
Mannequins and mixed media, 260 x 193 x 1073 cm

PAUL MCCARTHY (see p109)

Garden Dead Men, 1992-1994

Latex rubber, foam rubber, wig, clothing,
and tables, 2 parts: 243 x 76 x 98 cm

140 141
 RONI HORN
(b. 1955 New York City, U.S.A.) Roni
Horn’s works often employ minimalist forms
that refer to the natural world. Her sculptures, photographs, drawings,
and installations tend to be structured according to twinned concepts,
addressing the relationships between the human and the natural, the
fixed landscape and changing weather, the self and the other, internal,
psychological life and exterior, natural forms. Making use of doubling
and repetition, Horn pays close attention to the dialog created
between the work, the space it inhabits, and the other works with
which it is situated. For Horn, this engagement with duality is related
metaphorically to her own identity, particularly to her androgynous
appearance. In a.k.a. (2008-2009), Horn literalizes this examination
through a series of paired self-portraits, taken by various friends and
family members. Each pair of images presents Horn at two different
stages of her life, tracking the changes in her appearance as she ages
as well as her personal decision to render her gender ambiguous. The
work becomes a photographic autobiography, presenting identity as
never stable, but rather in constant flow and flux. CW
a.k.a., 2008-2009
30 Inkjet prints on rag paper, 38 x 33 cm each
142
RYAN TRECARTIN
(b. 1981 Webster, U.S.A.) Ryan
Trecartin’s videos conjure alternate realities
and warped futures populated by a motley cast of unstable, ambiguously
gendered characters, many of which are played by Trecartin himself.
These characters rush across the screen with screaming, lysergic
abandon through a cacophony of digital effects, hyperactive editing,
and candy-colored face paint, as if the product of an Internet fever
dream. Fittingly, Trecartin’s works initially appeared on the video-
sharing website YouTube, where their visual supersaturation and semi-
incomprehensible teenage techno-babble are not totally out of place.
Instead, Trecartin’s videos can be seen as a kind of sounding board,
amplifying the manic energy of the digital free-for-all until it echoes
back on itself.
Trecartin’s videos are populated with characters with multiple identities,
clones, or digital avatars, and which, like the videos’ supersaturated
aesthetic, also reflect the (virtual) realities of the digitized world.
Online, we can create new images of ourselves, fashion new identities,
and even maintain multiple personalities, just as Trecartin’s characters
are able to do in his videos. As such, just as his madcap aesthetic is
merely an amplification of the frenzied realm of the digital, Trecartin’s
characters, strange though they are, can be seen as warped reflections
of ourselves, as we appear in the digital hall of mirrors. CW
P.opular S.ky (section ish), 2009
Video, 40:00
143
 ROBERTO CUOGHI
(b. 1973 Modena, Italy) Beginning
in 1998, Roberto Cuoghi became his father.
He adopted his father’s style of dress, and carefully imitated his daily
habits. He ballooned to over 150 kilograms, grew a beard, and bleached
his hair white. People began to treat him as if he was his father’s
age—they gave up their seats, opened doors, offered to help him with
his bags. It was a radical transformation, and, unsurprisingly, one that
was hard to reverse. For over five years he inhabited his father’s life,
and the process of returning to some semblance of his original self
was a grueling one, which required multiple surgeries and left him with
lingering health problems.
In successfully fast-forwarding his life, Cuoghi voluntarily submitted
to the fear that we will one day all grow up to be our parents. For
the Biennale, Cuoghi has created a series of paintings that play on a
related psychological roadblock: the idealized image of our future lives
that forms in the minds of our parents, sometimes before we are born.
The paintings are self-portraits of the artist, not as he is, but how his
mother imagined, or hoped, that he might be. As such, they can be seen
as totems erected in honor of a life not lived, icons of defiance, and,
perhaps, as a kind of apology. CW
Untitled, 2003
Mixed media on tracing paper,
acetate and glass, 73 x 53 cm
144
MORTON BARTLETT
(b. 1909 Chicago, U.S.A.; d. 1992 Boston, U.S.A.) In
1993, an antiques dealer named
Marion Harris made a curious discovery at an antique fair in New York:
a collection of anatomically correct, handcrafted dolls packed carefully
in thirty-year-old newspapers, accompanied by stacks of black and
white photographs of the dolls (both with and without clothes), in a
variety of intricately staged tableaux. The items were from the estate
of the recently deceased Morton Bartlett, who had spent his life
working as a commercial photographer and graphic designer in Boston.
Though few knew of Bartlett’s strange obsession with his collection
of dolls, he was a far cry from naïve outsiders like Henry Darger, with
whom he is often compared. Raised by a wealthy adoptive family,
Bartlett studied at the prestigious Philips Exeter Academy and briefly
at Harvard University, and was known to attend art exhibitions with his
social circle of well-heeled Bostonians. Bartlett’s relationship with his
creations remained largely secret—brought to life through a private
labor of love, the dolls can be seen as embodied projections of his
desire. CW
Untitled, Standing Girl, c. 1950-1960
Plaster with polychrome and fiber hair, 81 cm high
145
 CINDY SHERMAN
(b. 1954 Glen Ridge, U.S.A.) Cindy
Sherman first rose to prominence with her
Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), a series of sixty-nine photographs
that appear to have been taken from an array of B-grade movies in a
variety of recognizable genres, in which Sherman always appears in
the starring role. To make each image, Sherman transformed herself
with wigs, makeup, and costumes in order to inhabit a series of
stereotypical female roles—innocent schoolgirl, femme fatale, pining
housewife—which, in turn, can be imagined to inhabit an equal number
of hackneyed narrative tropes. At once typology and critique, the
works went beyond an unpacking of filmic representations of women to
address how predetermined roles and types contribute to the formation
of individual identity.
These early works laid the foundation on which the rest of Sherman’s
practice has been built. In her photographic work to date, Sherman
continues to use herself as her subject. Her costumes and backdrops
have become increasingly elaborate, and her themes have become
darker, tingeing her photographs with traces of sexual violence,
desperation, decay, and death. However, despite the inevitable changes
in her work, Sherman is still concerned primarily with the costume play
of identity—the ways we attempt to mold ourselves into images of an
idealized other, along with the ways we inevitably fail. CW
Untitled, 2010
Pigment print on PhotoTex adhesive fabric, dimensions variable
146
TEHCHING HSIEH
(b. 1950 Nanzhou, Taiwan) Tehching
Hsieh is best known for a series of year-
long performances he completed between 1979 and 1986. In each of
these works, Hsieh followed a simple set of rules, which over the course
of an entire year, become feats of endurance. These performances
were recorded in photographs and statements of intent, which now
comprise the documentation of the work. Hsieh spent a year in a cage-
like enclosure in the corner of his studio during which time he was not
allowed to read, watch television, listen to the radio, or speak (1978-
1979); a year entirely outdoors (1981-1982); a year tied to fellow artist
Linda Montano with an eight-foot rope, during which time they were
not allowed to touch (1983-1984), and a year in which he ceased to
make, view, or speak about art (1985-1986). In One Year Performance
(1980-1981) Hsieh spent a year punching a time-clock every hour of
every day, taking a photograph of himself as part of his record keeping
account. As spare and restrained as the work itself, the individual
images register the passage of time only through the progressive
growth of Hsieh’s hair, which he had shaved at the beginning of the
performance. These separate portraits mark the passage of time like
the monotonous beats of a metronome, but, taken together, form a kind
of timeline that is essentially a single, larger portrait of a year. CW
One Year Performance April 11, 1980-April 11, 1981,
(Punching the Time Clock) 1980-1981
C-print, 32 x 22 cm
147
 NAMJIN LIM
(b. 1970 Gwangju, South Korea) Namjin
Lim creates elaborate, painstaking ink
drawings using the same, traditional techniques with which ancient
Buddhist religious icons were produced. However, in Lim’s works, the
ancient world of gods and demons is intermingled with scenes from
contemporary life, often to pointed effect. Her work, For the Souls of
the Departed (2000), depicts the atrocities perpetrated by Chun Doo-
hwan’s military forces during the Gwangju Democratization Movement.
Amid scenes of unrest, many of which are bracingly forthright in their
address of the uprising’s brutal realities, two gnarled demons hold
court, gleefully reveling in the destruction. On a mountainside above
the fray, a collection of placid Buddha figures look down upon the
proceedings with a calm that bespeaks an equal measure of God-like
patience and chilly aloofness. This strange, occasionally incongruous
mixture of religious imagery with the triumphs and tragedies of
everyday life fashion Lim’s works into modern-day icons, which,
though they may not reflect humanity in an altogether rosy light, can
nonetheless be seen as astute interpretations. CW
Living Like a Drunkard Like a Dreamer, 2009
Painting, 152 x 205 cm
148
DIETER ROTH
(b. 1930 Hannover, Germany; d. 1998 Basel, Switzerland) Born
in 1930, Dieter Roth
spent his childhood years in Zurich during the war, before moving with
his parents to Bern in 1947. Throughout the 1960s, he developed
a diverse and prolific practice of writing, printmaking, sculpture,
and book making, often collaborating with colleagues in the Fluxus
movement. He became known for his use of decaying, natural
materials such as cheese, chocolate, birdseed, and feces, and for his
uncompromising personality.
Solo Scenes (1997-1998) was Roth’s last project. The 128-monitor
installation shows him ambling around his house and studio,
convalescing in isolation from his most recent bout with alcoholism.
Saddled with a large amount of free time while recuperating, and yet
frustrated by television’s manipulative fictions and endless culture-
industry products, Roth made a series of daily videos about his routine
domestic trials. A mix of diaristic revelation, television overload, and
epic narcissism, Roth’s project takes the promise of television’s
reality and calls its bluff: our protagonist, broken with age and
drink, gives a vivid account of his own, real life. Much of the footage
in Solo Scenes shows Roth as a ghost-like figure (in night footage
mode on the camera), echoing his frail health and foreshadowing his
death shortly after the project began. The installation echoes with
voyeuristic, surveillance tape aesthetics, and the overwhelming amount
of visual information adds up to a dizzying account of the authentically
mundane. BT
Solo Scenes, 1997-1998
128 monitors with VCRs,
3 wooden shelves, 128 VHS-tapes
149
 ANDY WARHOL
(b. 1928 Pittsburg, U.S.A.; d. 1987 New York, U.S.A.) Andy
Warhol’s name has become
synonymous with both Pop Art and the practice of art as a business.
Known as much for his unorthodox, industrial-style production
methods and his meticulously constructed public persona as he was
for his iconic, brightly colored images lifted directly from the popular
culture of his day, Warhol carved out a niche for himself in the popular
imagination and irrevocably altered artistic practice.
Despite Warhol’s fame, there was one aspect of his practice that
remained unknown to all but a handful of friends and assistants
until after his death: a collection of over six-hundred equally sized
cardboard boxes filled with all manner of keepsakes and ephemera.
Warhol began collecting materials for these Time Capsules in 1974,
assiduously filling them with material that might some day be of
interest: a receipt from Max’s Kansas City, newspaper clippings, a pair
of Clark Gable’s shoes. Warhol toyed with the idea of selling the Time
Capsules, each for the same price, without divulging their contents,
but this plan never came to fruition. Instead, the boxes kept piling up
in storage until his untimely death in 1987, leaving a vast archive of his
life, or what amounts to a sprawling self-portrait in objects. Only one
of the Time Capsules had something resembling a coherent structure:
Time Capsule -27 was devoted to Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola,
who lived with the artist in New York from 1952 until 1971. They had
an extremely close relationship, and Warhol often integrated her
distinctive handwriting into his works. Nestled in his vast archive, Time
Capsule -27 is a portrait within a portrait, a box filled with tokens of
their relationship, marking the place Warhol kept for her in his heart.
CW
Time Capsule -27, n.d. (installation view)
Mixed media, dimensions variable
150
PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA
(b. 1951 Hartford, U.S.A.) Since
the 1980s, Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs
have blurred the lines between the spontaneous and the staged, the
intimate and the theatrical. Even his earliest works contain features of
both autobiographical reportage and the cinematic, arranging family
members and friends in subtlety staged domestic tableaux. In later
works, diCorcia took to the streets: for his series Hustlers (1990-1992)
he photographed male prostitutes in a similarly filmic style, paying
each their hourly asking price—noted matter-of-factly in the titles—in
exchange for their pictures. He further expanded his attempts to merge
the real and the cinematic in Street Work (1994-1998) and Heads
(2001-2003), rigging remote-controlled lighting setups on city streets
to create paradoxically theatrical, impromptu photographs.
Thousand (2009) is a collection of one thousand Polaroids culled
from diCorcia’s vast photographic output over the past twenty-five
years of his career. They reveal the diversity of his practice, including
family snapshots, portraits of friends and lovers, still lives, test shots
and sketches from past projects, fashion shots, and landscapes.
Exhibited in an unbroken row that snakes around the gallery walls,
Thousand forms not only a compact timeline of a life’s work, but also
an autobiography in images. CW
Thousand, 2009 (installation view)
1000 Polaroids mounted on aluminum, total length of photo rail: 104 m
151
 JANGSAMISA—PORTRAIT OF GWANGJU
The Yangdong traditional market has been a vibrant marketplace for
over 100 years and is considered the largest market in the Honam
region of Korea. Jangsamisa—a satellite project of the Gwangju
Biennale, programmed by Kyungwoon Jeong—will present an
accumulation of images, objects, and observations from merchants
and visitors to the market, which will add up to a rich experience of
individual and collective impressions.
Several sub-programs bring together various aspects of the market’s
history. Gwangju painter Taekyu Park will realize a special commission
for Jangsamisa, a large scale outdoor painting depicting the many
stories and characters of the market. Yangdong Market Diary is a
collection of objects, images, and oral histories of the market vendors
to reconstruct the history of this community. Though they may appear
small, rough, or old, these are treasures of Yangdong Market in their
own right.
152
The market is more than a place where goods are traded, it is a place
where people exchange ideas and stories. Map of the Marketplace
collects such gestures of rapport: customers will be asked to select
images of their favorite stores to complete the map with a thousand
emoticons. Open-Wall is a site where visitors to the market are invited
to write their impressions on the wall, creating a public view of their
diverse expressions and experiences. These three projects present
records of time, tracing the past, present, and future of Yangdong
market. We can find traces of the lives of our ancestors in Yangdong
Market Diary, see how small gestures can add up to a vibrant display of
contemporary life in Map of Marketplace, and share ideas about what
is still to come in Open-Wall.
YANGDONG MARKET DIARY
YANGDONG CULTURE CENTER
153
SPONSORS LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION
A Palazzo Gallery, Brescia
Official Sponsors Joshua Adler
American Folk Art Museum, New
York, Blanchard-Hill Collection
Anthology Film Archives New York
Arario Gallery, Seoul
Art:Concept, Paris
Aschenbach & Hofland Galleries,
Amsterdam
Balice Hertling Gallery, Paris
Helke Bayrle
Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi
Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New
Official Supplies Official Licensee
York
BSI Art Collection
James Castle Collection, Boise
Galerie Daniel Buchholz,
Cologne/Berlin
Galerie Bugada & Cargnel, Paris
Capitain Petzel, Berlin
Co-Marketing Sponsors Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
Galleria Continua San Gimignano/
Beijing/Le Moulin
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Pilar Corrias Ltd., London
Thomas Dane Gallery, London
Danziger Projects, New York
Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan
Elizabeth Dee, New York
Deitch Projects, New York
Deste Foundation, Athens
Eric Diefenbach and James Keith
Brown, New York
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Motive Gallery, Amsterdam
New York
Eleven Rivington, New York
Support
Ellipse Foundation – Contemporary The Museum of Photography,
Art Collection, Portugal
DAVID TEIGER Emotion Pictures
Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York
Gladstone Gallery, New York
Estate of Hermann Glöckner
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
The Granger Collection, New York
Greene Naftali Gallery, New York
Galerie Haas & Fuchs, Berlin
Hauser & Wirth
Hauser & Wirth Collection,
Switzerland
Ursula Hauser Collection,
Switzerland
Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation,
Toronto
Hotel, London
J. Crist, Boise
Steven Kasher Gallery, New York
Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
Anton Kern Gallery, New York
Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo
Knoedler & Company, New York
Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
Kukje Gallery, Seoul
Kunstmuseum Basel
Emma Kunz Foundation, Würenlos
Kurashiki Museum, Japan
L.A. Louver, Venice, CA
Rachel and Jean-Pierre Lehmann
Herbert List Estate
Long March Space, Beijing
Marvelli Gallery, New York
Matthew Marks, New York
Stephen Mazoh and Co., Inc.
Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York
Metro Pictures Gallery, New York
Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Musée National d’Art Moderne,
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Hamni
Museum fur Moderne Kunst,
Frankfurt am Main
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris
Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich
Regina Gallery, Moscow/London
Estate of Peter Roehr, Berlin
Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg-Paris
Dieter Roth Estate
Scheinbaum & Russek LTD,
Santa Fe
M. Scheler, Hamburg
Esther Schipper, Berlin
Karsten Schubert, London
Laurence and Patrick Seguin
ShanghArt Gallery, Beijing
Estate of Paul Sharits
Sichuan Fine Arts Institute
Sperone Westwater, New York
Sprüth Magers, Berlin/London
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus
und Kunstbau, Munich
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo/Kyoto
Take Ninagawa, Tokyo
Tate Collection, London
Courtesy Galleria Tega, Milan
Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo
Estate of Stan VanDerBeek
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
The Andy Warhol Museum,
Pittsburgh
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin
Michael Werner Gallery, New York/
Berlin
Helene Winer
ZERO…, Milan
David Zwirner, New York
303 Gallery, New York

Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw Myunggi Museum, Damyang

Fondazione Sandretto Re Greene Naftali Gallery

Rebaudengo, Torino
Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan
Foundation of Arts & Culture,
Seoul
FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Rheims
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Galerie Fortlaan 17, Gent
Geiger Archive, Munich
Akimitsu Naruyama, Tokyo
National Film Center, The National
Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
Neugerriemschneider, Berlin
Doug Niven
Ock Rang Kim
One and J. Gallery, Seoul
OneWest Publishing
PKM Gallery, Seoul

154 155
VENUES GENERAL INFORMATION
EXHIBITION PERIOD
2010.9.3-11.7
VISITING HOURS
9:00 am-6:00pm
VENUES
GWANGJU BIENNALE HALL
211 Biennale 2 gil Buk-Gu
Gwangju, Korea (500-070) /
T.062-608-4114
GWANGJU MUSEUM OF ART
52 Haseo-ro Buk-Gu Gwangju,
Korea / T.062-613-7100
GWANGJU FOLK MUSEUM
213 Biennale 2 gil Buk-gu,
Gwangju, Korea /
T.062-521-9041
GWANGJU FOLKLORE
EDUCATION CENTER
213 Biennale 2 gil Buk-gu,
Gwangju, Korea
T.062-521-9041
YANGDONG TRADITIONAL MARKET
441 Yangdong Seo-gu, Gwangju,
Korea (502-729) /
T.062-362-2042
COST OF ADMISSION
SINGLE DAY TICKETS
Adults (19-64): 14,000
Youth (13-18): 5,000
Child (4-12): 3,000
Seniors (+65): 4,000
Families
(Parents + 2 children): 26,000
* Special group discounts are
available
EXHIBITION PASS
Adult: 30,000
Youth: 20,000
Child: 10,000
Ticket Prices (in Korean Won)
156
EXHIBITION TOURS
1. DOCENT PROGRAM
Docent led-tours are available
in Korean and English and
are offered 8 times a day
(Please refer to the timetable).
Reservations are essential for
groups.
Docent Program Operating
Period: 2010.9 3-11.7
Timetable: every hour from
10:00 to 16:00
Tours last 60-90 min
Maximum participants: 20 people
Meeting point: Information Desk,
Gwangju Biennale Hall, Gallery 1
Reservations: www.gb.or.kr
Inquiry : docents@gb.or.kr
2. SMARTPHONE APPLICATION
(FOR IPHONE)
A Gwangju Biennale 2010
application will be available for
iPhone users. This application
will be available in Korean and
English as a free download at
app stores starting in August
2010.
Contents: Gwangju Biennale
2010 Overview, participating
artists, artwork information,
latest news
Inquiry: docents@gb.or.kr
3. EDUCATION FOR YOUNG STUDENTS
(CLASS EDUCATION)
Gwangju Biennale 2010 provides
Young Students Class Education
sessions to further enhance
understanding of visual art and
to encourage young students’
early experiences with art.
Reservations are required.
Program Operating Period:
2010.9.7 - 11.7 (Except
Sundays and Mondays, 5 times
a day)
Timetable: 09:00, 10:00, 11:00,
12:00, 13:00
Program lasts 40 min (approx.)
Venues: Gwangju Museum of Art
(Lecture Hall) & Gwangju Folk
Museum (Media Room)
Maximum participants: 100
people
Reservations: www.gb.or.kr
Inquiry : docents@gb.or.kr
157
TRAVEL INFO (BIENNALE)
HOW TO FIND US
The venues of the 8th Gwangju
Biennale include Gwangju Biennale
Hall, Gwangju Museum of Art,
Gwangju Folk Museum, Gwangju
Folklore Education Center. There
will be special projects held in the
Yangdong Market, Gwangju’s well-
known traditional marketplace.
BUS
Bus #83, 64
to Biennale Exhibition Hall
Bus #58, 95
to Gyeongsin Girls High School,
then take a taxi to Biennale
Exhibition Hall
Bus #19, 38, 56
to Jeonnam University Side
Entrance, then take a taxi to
Biennale Exhibition Hall
Bus #57
to Yuchang Apartment, then take a
taxi to Biennale Exhibition Hall
TAXI
from Gwangju Station:
3000 won/10 min
from Gwangcheon Bus Terminal:
3000 won/10 min
from Gwangju Airport:
8000 won/30 min
from Chungjang-ro Gwangju:
6000 won/20 min
BY CAR
Honam Expressway -> Seo Gwangju
IC -> Right Turn -> Right Turn ->
Gwangju Biennale Parking Lot
TRAVEL INFO
(YANGDONG TRADITIONAL MARKET)
BUS
160, 760 / 19, 30 ,36,37, 39, 48,
99 / 52, 59, 61, 65, 69, 71, 72, 79,
82, 177
SUBWAY
Get off at Yangdong Traditional
Market Station (Exit # 1)
TAXI
From Gwangju Station:
7 min/2600 won;
from Gwangcheon Terminal:
12 min/3500 won;
from Gwangju Airport:
30 min/ 8000 won
IMAGE CREDITS & PERMISSIONS 28 © Sherrie Levine/© Walker 49 © Jacob Kassay, Courtesy 75 © Sergey Zarva, Courtesy 104 © Jeff Koons, Courtesy Deste 135 © Jung Lee, Courtesy One and
Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Eleven Rivington, New York, Photo: Regina Gallery, Moscow & London Foundation, Athens J Gallery, Seoul
Museum of Art, New York, Courtesy Rons Amstutz
8 © Sanggil Kim, Courtesy PKM 76 © Magnum Photos, Courtesy 105 © Laurie Simmons, Courtesy 134 © Keren Cytter, Courtesy Pilar
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Gallery, Seoul 50, 86 © Kan Xuan, Courtesy of Danziger Projects, New York Sperone Westwater, New York Corrias Gallery, London
29 © Sturtevant, Courtesy Museum Galleria Continua San Gimignano/
9, 86 © 2010 Bruce Nauman/ 77 © Freddy Alborta, 1967, 106© Berlinde De Bruyckere, 136 © Alice Kok
für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Beijing/Le Moulin
Artists Rights Society (ARS), Courtesy Leandro Katz and Courtesy Hauser and Wirth, Zurich,
Main, Photo: Axel Schneider
New York, Courtesy Walker Art 51 © Glenn Brown, Courtesy Henrique Faría Fine Art, New York Photo: Mirjam Devriendt. 137 © Ming Wong
Center, Minneapolis/T. B. Walker 30 © Aurélien Froment, Photo: Gagosian Gallery, London
Acquisition Fund, 1994 Aurélien Mole, Courtesy Motive 78 © Carl Andre/VAGA. Courtesy 107 © Jacques Charlier, Courtesy 138 © Jean-Luc Godard, Courtesy
Gallery, Amsterdam. 52 © Harold & Esther Edgerton Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Gallerie Fortlaan 17, Ghent Emotion Pictures
10 © Sanja Iveković, Courtesy Foundation, 2010, Courtesy Palm and Stephen Mazoh and Co., Inc.
May18 Democratic Associations 31 © Wu Wenguang Press, Inc. 108 © Jonathan Borofsky, 140 © Thom Puckey, Courtesy
for Honorable Persons and Victim’s 79 © Gu Dexin, Courtesy Galleria Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, Aschenbach & Hofland Galleries,
Family 32, 66 © Mark Leckey, Courtesy 53 © 1990 Amon Carter Museum, Continua San Gimignano/Beijing/ New York Amsterdam
Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the Le Moulin
11 Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, York artist, P1990.52.95 109, 141 © Paul McCarthy, 142 © Roni Horn, Courtesy Hauser
New York 80 © Doug Niven/© Tuol Sleng Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Photo: and Wirth
33 © Lee Friedlander, Courtesy 54 © Artur Żmijewski, Museum of Genocide, Cambodia. Stefan Altenburger Photography
12 © Anne Collier, Courtesy Anton Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco CourtesyFoksal Gallery Foundation, Courtesy Doug Niven Zürich 143 © Ryan Trecartin, Courtesy
Kern Gallery, New York Warsaw Elizabeth Dee, New York and
34 © Heungsoon Im 81 © 2010 Gustav Metzger, 110 © Nayland Blake, Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New
13 © Arnoud Holleman, Courtesy 55 © João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Courtesy Generali Foundation Matthew Marks Gallery, New York York
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 36 Courtesy Estate of Stan Paiva, Courtesy Galeria ZERO…, Collection, Vienna, Photo: Sylvain
VanDerBeek. Originally re-staged Milan, Photo: Raimund Zakowski Deleu 111 © Art Orienté Objet 144 © Roberto Cuoghi, Courtesy
14 Courtesy OneWest Publishing at Guild & Greyshkul, New York Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan
and Joseph Bellows Gallery (2008) 56, 86 © Harun Farocki, 2010, 82 © Liu Wei 112 © 2010 Artists Rights Society
Courtesy Greene Naftali, New York (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. 145 Courtesy Ricco/Maresca
15 Courtesy The Museum of 37 © Bridget Riley, Courtesy 83 © Eye Glass Shop Courtesy Kurashiki Museum, Tokyo Gallery, New York
Photography, Seoul, Hanmi Timothy Taylor Gallery and Karsten 57 © Shinro Ohtake, Courtesy Take
Foundation of Arts & Culture Schubert, London Ninagawa, Tokyo 87 Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, 113 Collection Fondazione 146 © Cindy Sherman, Courtesy
Courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino Metro Pictures, New York
16 © Pawel Althamer, Courtesy 38 © Ataru Sato, Courtesy Gallery 58 © Hanyong Kim
Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw Naruyama, Tokyo 88, 141 © Seungtaek Lee 114 © Kienholz, Courtesy L.A. 147 © 1981 Tehching Hsieh,
and Neugerrimschneider, Berlin. 59 © Duncan Campbell, Courtesy Louver, Venice, California Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, Images
Collection Fondazione Sandretto 39 © 2010 Artists Rights Society Hotel, London 89 © 2010 Artists Rights Society from Out of Now: The Lifeworks of
Re Rebaudengo, Turin (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; 115 © John De Andrea, Courtesy Tehching Hsieh
Bonn, Courtesy Galerie Barbara 60 © Danh Vo, Courtesy Galerie Courtesy Musée National d’Art Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York
17 © Mike Kelley, Courtesy Weiss, Berlin and Cardi Black Box, Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 148 © Namjin Lim
Gagosian Gallery Milan, Photo: Axel Schneiderf Photo by André Morin 116 © John Miller, Courtesy Paula
61 © Hans-Peter Feldmann, Cooper Gallery, New York and 149 © Dieter Roth Estate,
18 Photography by E. J. Bellocq, © 40 © Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York 90 Courtesy Ydessa Hendeles Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
Lee Friedlander, Courtesy Fraenkel Courtesy Take Ishii Gallery & the Ydessa Hendeles Art (installation view, 48 Biennale di
Gallery, San Francisco 62 © Irina Botea Foundation, Toronto, Photo: Robert 117 Courtesy Estate of Oh Yoon Venezia, 1999)
41 © Haegue Yang, Courtesy Keziere
19 © Franz Gertsch, Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul. Photo: Bob 63 © Seth Price, Courtesy Capitain 119 Courtesy Ullstein Bild/The 150 © 2010 The Andy Warhol
Galerie Haas & Fuchs, Berlin Matheson and the Art Gallery of Petzel, Berlin and Friedrich Petzel 91 © Tom Holert Granger Collection, New York Foundation for the Visual Arts,
Greater Victoria Gallery, New York Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS),
20 © Christopher Williams, 92 © YangAh Ham 120 © Herbert List Estate, M. New York
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York 42 © Tokuma Shoten Publishing 66 © Overplus Project Scheler, Hamburg Germany
Co., Ltd. 93 Courtesy The James Castle 151 © Philip-Lorca diCorcia,
21 © 2010 Artists Rights Society 67 Exhibition view, Schirn Collection, Boise, Idaho/Courtesy 121 © Cyprien Gaillard, Courtesy Courtesy David Zwirner, New York
(ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, 43 Courtesy Anthology Film Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2009, © Knoedler & Company, New York Galerie Bugada & Cargnel, Paris
Bonn, Courtesy David Zwirner, New Archives New York City; Greene Norbert Miguletz
York Naftali Gallery, New York City; 94 Courtesy Michael Werner, Berlin 123 © Maurizio Cattelan, Photo:
68 © Byungsoo Choi Zeno Zotti
Estate of Paul Sharits
22 © Franco Vaccari 95 © 2010 Artists Rights Society
69 © Rabih Mroué (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, 124 © Anton C. Meier, Emma Kunz
44 © Tauba Auerbach, Courtesy
23, 141 © Maria Lassnig, Courtesy Bonn Foundation, CH-5436 Würenlos,
Deitch Projects, New York 70 © 2010 Artists Rights Society
Hauser and Wirth Switzerland
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, 96 © Liu Zheng, Courtesy Yossi
45 © Kerstin Brätsch, Courtesy
24 © Jakub Ziółkowski, Courtesy Courtesy Galleria Tega, Milan Milo Gallery, New York 125 © Tong Bingxue
Balice Hertling Gallery, Paris
Foksal Gallery, Warsaw
71 © 2010 Artists Rights Society 97 © Anna Artaker 127 © Taekyu Park
46 © 2010 Artists Rights Society
25 © Peter Fischli David Weiss, (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris,
(ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, 128 © Zhou Xiaohu, Courtesy Long
Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, 98 © Kang Bongkyu
Bonn, Courtesy The Geiger Archive, March Space, Beijing
New York Paris, Photo: Romain Lopez
Munich 99 © Yasmine Kabir
26 © 2010 Artists Rights Society 72 © Useful Photography (Hans 130 © Henrik Olesen, Courtesy
47 Courtesy Long March Space, 100 Collection of Ock Rang Kim Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln/Berli
(ARS), New York/VG Bild Kunst, Aarsman, Claudie de Cleen, Julian
Beijing
Bonn/Archiv Paul Maenz, Berlin, Germain, Erik Kessels, Hans van
Courtesy Estate Peter Roehr der Meer), Photographs by Ad van 101 © Zhang Enli, Courtesy 131 © Hyejeong Cho
48 © 2010 Artists Rights Society ShanghART Gallery, Beijing, and
(ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Denderen
27 © Walker Evans Archive, The Hauser and Wirth 132 © Andro Wekua, Courtesy
Bonn, Courtesy Esther Schipper, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New 73 © Hito Steyerl
Berlin, Photo: Attilio Maranzano 102 Courtesy Arario Gallery, Seoul
York; Courtesy The Library of
74 © 2010 Artists Rights Society 133 © Kwangho Choi
Congress, Washington, D.C.
(ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, 103 © Matt Mullican, Courtesy
Bonn Tracy Williams, Ltd.

158 159
GWANGJU BIENNALE DIRECTOR OF POLICY & RESEARCH PR & BUSINESS DEPARTMENT EXHIBITION CREDITS ADMINISTRATION/MANAGEMENT DOCENTS
FOUNDATION DEPARTMENT Kyoungmin Lew Woosung Lee Sohyun Kang, Yoonhee Kwan,
Eunyoung Kim Jinkyoung Jeong ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Myung Kim, Danhwa Kim, Dongseon
Goeun Lee Massimiliano Gioni EXHIBITION COORDINATOR Kim, Moonsung Kim, Mihee Kim,
PRESIDENT
DIRECTOR OF ADMINISTRATIVE Jiyoung Ahn Namgyeong Hong Minha Kim, Sunhee Kim, Seonghee
Untae Kang DEPARTMENT Tae Cheon EXHIBITION COORDINATOR/ Hyunjoo Lee Kim, Sujin Kim, Joohee Kim, Hanui
Yongseong Kim ASSISTANT CURATOR Jungmin Lee Kim, Eunhee Na, Youngji Ryu,
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Jeesun Kim Jenny Moore Jeongeun Shim Eunyoung Moon, Miso Park,
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VICE PRESIDENT PUBLICATION MANAGER/ Aurélie Wacquant Mazura Sung, Gyeongri Shin, Eunhee
Inho Cho Keunjong Lim, Chief
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Mansub Roh
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DIRECTOR OF PR & BUSINESS DEPARTMENT Youseon Gang
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Jitaek Park Mihee Ahn, Chief Chris Wiley Eonjin Chin
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Jungho Bin Jeongeun Shim A/V Tino Sehgal, Instead of allowing
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Trade Mexico City
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160 161
SHORT GUIDE CREDITS PUBLISHER Published on the occasion of the
Gwangju Biennale Foundation exhibition 10,000 Lives, the 8th
EDITORS 211 Biennale 2 Gil, Buk-Gu Gwangju Biennale, September
3-November 7, 2010.
Massimiliano Gioni Gwangju 500-070, Korea
Judy Ditner T. +82 (0)62 608 4114
F. +82 (0)62 608 4409
© Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
EDITORIAL THINK TANK www.gb.or.kr All rights reserved. Except for the
Mihee Ahn legitimate excerpts customary in
Jenny Moore DESIGN
reviews of scholarly publications, no
Chris Wiley TEXT part of this book may be reproduced
49 Gahoe-dong, Jongno-gu  by any means without express
MANAGING EDITOR Seoul, 110-210, Korea written permission of the publisher.
Yoonhee Chun T. +82 10 3338 0862
F +82 2 742 3441 The editor and publisher gratefully
ARTISTS’ ENTRIES www.therewhere.com acknowledge the permission granted
to reproduce the copyright material
Chris Wiley
DISTRIBUTOR in this book. Every effort has been
Benjamin Tiven made to trace copyright holders and
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MARK LECKEY THOM PUCKEY ANDRO WEKUA
JUNG LEE BRIDGET RILEY CHRISTOPHER
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YAMAGUCHI
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