Nicolas Bourriaud Sounds Out the Gwangju Biennale

Colin Siyuan Chinnery: Taking pansori, a Korean form of music and storytelling, as a soundscape of the 21st century is a unique way of approaching an exhibition. How did you come up with the idea? 

Nicolas Bourriaud: I began with vernacular elements of Korean culture: I wanted to start with something that could be located. That’s how I discovered pansori, this minimalistic, operatic musical form, which appeared at the end of the 17th century and originally accompanied shamanistic rituals. It’s linked to very specific places in the south of Korea, but it also has to do with the shamanistic ambition of entering non-human spaces. It was an interesting metaphor for me to start with.

I wanted to show how artists in the 21st century are completely re-envisioning the notion of space, and that sound is very much used to define space. So I had the core elements for an exhibition that would be quite operatic. I identified three main sounds that correspond to space. The first being feedback, or the ‘Larsen effect’. It’s the sound produced when two emitters are too close to each other. It expresses saturation – the lack of space.

The first part of the exhibition is about saturation, about the hyper-densification of space and about the difficulty to find your own space in society, both physically and mentally. The second sound is polyphony. This interests me as a metaphor for the intertwining of realms, and the way some artists are integrating non-human spheres into their work and organizing a kind of polyphonic vision of the world, which is not only theirs but includes the other.

The third sound corresponds to those artists looking for what the French philosopher Tristan Garcia calls the great ‘outdoor’ – or way out. Because of the saturated space we’re living in, because the planet is shrinking, they are either looking for the infinitely small or the infinitely huge. So this operatic exhibition starts with a sound piece by Emeka Ogboh made in the streets and marketplaces of Lagos, Nigeria. When you enter the exhibition, you have the impression of being in a very urban-saturated space. 

CSC: In Korea, shamanistic practices are associated with the idea of healing. So, there’s a connection between pansori and healing. Polyphony is a metaphor for coexistence and the necessity of dissonance. Feedback can be thought of as the destructive echo chamber created by social media.

NB: Exactly: an echo chamber. That’s the idea for the first floor. Another image is the loop, one of the most prominent forms in today’s world, at every level of economics, politics and aesthetics. Obviously, we have to get out of all the loops that we have installed. I never make a show as an illustration of a statement or an idea, but I’m trying for an almost musical type of curating here. It’s like an opera – I’m writing the libretto and then the artists are the singers. The coexistence of their works in the same space or along a defined route is how meaning is created, through dialogues. I want to confront my own theories with the way artists are envisioning the questions I’m exploring.

‘I never make a show as an illustration of a statement or an idea.’

CSC: We relate to sound in a very different way to images: it’s more primordial and more sensuous. We feel sound without having to think about it. How have you designed the physical space to work with this medium?

NB: The entrance to the exhibition is a tunnel. People are conducted along a specific route; I don’t want them to roam too freely. The first floor is devoted to the very urban-saturated space. The second floor is about the feeling of oppression we can get in what appears to be a much more open space – the countryside – but which is not actually so. It brings together artworks that are different but lead to the same conclusion. There is a new video by Liam Gillick, for example, shot on Fogo Island, a very beautiful, seductive landscape, which he has juxtaposed with very bureaucratic, administrative sounds. Then you have Max Hooper Schneider, whose work is about extinction and the way we are witnessing, at the moment, a kind of post-apocalyptic state in the world.

The third floor is polyphonies – possibilities of dialogues with the vegetal world, the mineral world, even the robotic world. The fourth floor is about the infinitely big. Here you have artists like Marguerite Humeau, Josèfa Ntjam and Jura Shust, all interested in shamanism. The top floor – the fifth – is about the molecular, how to show today’s world with the smallest components possible. For example, there is Marina Rheingantz, a Brazilian artist who represents the world with an almost impressionist, postmolecular approach. After the saturation you have when entering the tunnel, you will leave with this view of the infinitely small. Then there is actually a second part to the exhibition.

CSC: The pavilions?

NB: There are the pavilions, but there is also a continuation of the main exhibition, located in different buildings in the neighborhood called Yangnim: mainly sound pieces. The idea is to have people discover another part of the city.

CSC: This brings me to my next question, which is the relationship of the Biennale to the ‘Gwangju spirit’ that came out of the Gwangju Uprising in 1980 against the military dictatorship, which was brutally crushed at the time. How are you incorporating the Gwangju spirit into your curatorial thinking?

NB: The uprising and its consequences are still very much present in the city’s life. This notion is even more important today when we see walls being built everywhere in the world and countries isolating themselves. I think that the legacy of the Gwangju spirit is the possibility for artists to build their own maps of the spaces they live in, which is not allowed in totalitarian or dictatorial countries. The control of space, the way you see space and the possibility to claim space are all very important for me. The Korean artist Choi Haneyl is making work about the place allotted to homosexuals in Korea, for example – and this is also a matter of space. That which has no place cannot be emancipated.

CSC: This brings us back to the idea of sound: walls and isolationism are about containment, and sound is the very opposite of containment. Sound is flux: it’s flow, energy, vibrations, and it cannot have borders. 

NB: You mentioned walls, and there’s a work by the American artist Na Mira that is of particular interest in that respect. She’s been working in Seoul around people’s memories of the wall that was built by the American army in the middle of the city after the Korean War.

CSC: The origins of the Biennale in the Gwangju spirit are quite similar to how documenta was launched in Europe’s postwar rubble. You’ve worked in Taipei and Istanbul, but you’re a European curator. Have you encountered differences of opinion with audiences, artists, curators in East Asia?

NB: Well, it’s a very complex question. On a personal level, I have always been struck by the fact that my theories – especially relational aesthetics – have been more favourably received in Asia than in Europe in some ways. When I was 20, I spent two months in a monastery in Thiksey in the Ladakh region of northern India. I have always been interested in Buddhist philosophy; it has impregnated my way of seeing the world and I have written a lot about it. I think there are cultural and semantic elements that I use which speak much more directly to someone who’s also familiar with this approach to life and thinking. I have a constant relationship with Asia because I try to integrate Asian philosophy into my own way of thinking.

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^{Main image: Nicolas Bourriaud at Bernhard Leitner’s Le Cylindre Sonore (1987), Paris, 2024. Photo: Nicole Maria Winkler}