15th Gwangju Biennale

 Curated by Nicolas Bourriaud

ALONE ON A WHITE PLINTH, a riotous tangle of form explodes with intense, searing color. The closer we approach, the greater the density of this concretion becomes, until we are only inches away from what appears to be a dense coil of aquatic life. Agnieszka Kurant’s Chemical Garden, 2021–, is indeed living, but its form of life is not organic. 

Kurant employs the transparent glass cube—a staple of systems aesthetics, from Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube of 1963–67 to Trevor Paglen’s Autonomy Cube of 2015—to explore the living systems of the twenty-first century. But the fluid within is actually sodium silicate, and the growing structures are copper, nickel, cobalt, chromium, iron, and manganese salts. Collaborating with a chemist from Warsaw University, Kurant recycled the metals used in our personal computers, sealing them within this water-glass aquarium. Chemical reactions induce the formation of these crystals, and their tumultuous thicket will continue to grow and change throughout the exhibition’s run, before slowly dissolving back into solution. A glacially paced kinetic sculpture, the work encodes a nonhuman temporality into what we mistakenly see as a static form. Kurant’s work speaks to the complex intertwining of organic and inorganic compounds that lay the foundation of our living biosphere.

At a molecular scale, transition metals undergird essential dynamics of all organic life. Current research suggests that iron-rich oceans of the Archean Period served to catalyze the first biochemical monomers. Eons later, deep seabeds of polymetallic nodules may have generated electrolytic production of oxygen, fostering complex life even in the total absence of light. Like viruses, these biomolecular events evidence a continuum between what we commonly describe as the living and nonliving. We are only beginning to understand the relationship between these spheres: In his 2024 book Becoming Earth, science writer Ferris Jabr describes both soil and seawater as living bodies, in that even the smallest amount of either is replete with billions of microorganisms. And while the rainforest and the desertseem to occupy opposite poles of habitability, Jabr describes how the phosphate-rich dust of the Sahara’s Bodélé Depression, formed from centuries of sunken microplankton diotoms, continuously sweeps over the Atlantic to refertilize the Amazon Basin. These material-biochemical systems exhibit a manner of collective intelligence, directed toward the resilience of the biosphere itself. 

For the 15th Gwangju Biennale, director Nicolas Bourriaud describes setting out to explore “the sound of ecosystems” in the age of the Anthropocene. His title, “Pansori: A Soundscape of the 21st Century,” takes its cue from the Korean folk tradition of pansori, an extended song-story delivered in public space. In such a sprawling exhibition—encompassing seventy-two artists from thirty countries across nine venues—this framework ultimately offered little help for navigating the diverse works on display. Rather than attempting my own bird’s-eye view, I want to focus on a group of audiovisual installations in the main exhibition hall, in which I found a more coherent thread in the literary trope of the katabasis, or the journey to the underworld.Writer Robert Macfarlane has described how ancient stories—Enki’s journey for Gilgamesh, and those of Orpheus and Aeneas—speak to the archaic roots of our concepts “to understand” and “to discover” in a descent, in the search of knowledge, beyond the human realm.  

In Sung Tieu’s System’s Void, 2024, we encounter a sand dune filled with barrel-size pipes opening to the sky. We cannot peer into them, so their depths remain opaque. Behind, we see a projection of inscrutable numbers and letters, seemingly references to a classification system, while a modulating drone of sounds suffuse the air. Tieu’s work draws from the contemporary practice of “sonification,” in which scientific data is translated into sound—ostensibly for the purpose of better grasping the information experientially. 

Working with scientists and NGOs concerned with the toxic chemicals released by hydraulic fracturing, Tieu attempted to gather data from the annual environmental disclosures companies are required to make public. But instead of chemicals, she found only inscrutable codes—the patents recording legally protected trade secrets. As such, even the detection of specific compounds—much less their regulation—is made impossible. Tieu’s work thus reverses the typical model of sonification: Rather than making data more perceptible, the work ultimately reveals nothing but a legally enforced opacity.  

Andrius Arutiunian’s sound installation Below (For the Ones Who Murmur), 2024,similarly delves into the murky underworld of petrochemical dependence, yet Tieu’s largely conceptual focus gives way here to a profoundly visceral aesthetic. Arutiunian has rigged five large metal disks with transducers and enshrouded these objects with bitumen, a viscous black substance that is derived from eons of compressed microscopic life. An ancient and storied material—supposedly the waterproofing for Noah’s Ark—bitumen is also an emblem of the Anthropocene, a by-product of petroleum refining and a substance used to create the roads on which our petroleum-fueled vehicles drive. In Arutiunian’s hands, the bitumen’s black is not simply a color but a deeply physical sensation. Poured over the metal disks, it shimmers brilliantly in the gallery lights, subsuming visuality itself under its thickly material force. Meanwhile, the transducers emit a low eldritch rumbling (the result of the collision of two tuning systems) that is not unlike the sound of the bubbling-up of bitumen itself—“a murmur,” the artist has written, “often interpreted in ancient writings as a rumbling echo of the divining underworld demons.” Using material to shape sounds that refer back to that material, Arutiunian’s installation becomes a catabolic machine: in the artist’s words, “distorting, amplifying and resonating sonic frequencies sent through its body.” 

Kwon Hye-won’s audiovisual installation Cave of Portals, 2024, explores the deep time of a particularly well-preserved subterranean ecosystem: the great lava tubes on Jeju Island, a World Heritage Site that has long been off-limits to the public due to its natural fragility. A massive LED video wall, curved like the entrance to a cave, projects images of the site’s geological history, while an extraordinary range of sounds—collected using infrasonic and ultrasonic microphones—plays over speakers. Collaborating with speleologists, paleontologists, acousticians, and local villagers, Kwon weaves a stratigraphic mosaic of sounds and images—lava flowing and bats echolocating—from the cave’s history. Yet she seems cognizant of the profound chasm separating human from nonhuman perception, and while her sounds and images afford some entry into this nonhuman realm, they are punctuated by enigmatic titles she includes at the base of the video—“The sound of LEDs flickering at 500 times a second,” “The sound of cave images being projected on the LED screens”—describing sounds that remain beyond our perceptual awareness. Like Tieu, she seems thus to both utilize and critique models of “sonification” that would imagine technology only ever extending human mastery over profoundly nonhuman scales of space and time. 

As I’ve tried to illustrate, the journeys these artists undertake into the depths of the nonhuman world do not result in simple maps of terra incognita, of new territory to be known and mastered. Just as often, they point to the limits of our ability to know, or even to experience, that which undergirds the human body and its thresholds of perception. 

Take Sofya Skidan’s What do you call a weirdness that hasn’t quite come together?, 2019–24, a triptych of video projections on delicately fluttering fabric screens. Juxtaposing the rough cliffs of the Caucasus in southern Russia, the verdant jungles of Indonesia, and a green-screen studio, the artist also engages in a series of bodily contortions and poses in which she seems to either grow out of the landscape, or to merge with it. Echoing the photographs of Ana Mendieta or the painstakingly slow movements of the choreographer Maria Hassabi, Skidan’s tableaux reflect the artist’s desire to embody the formal logics of the natural world. Deeply rooted in the traditions of Indian yoga, of which she is a practitioner, Skidan views our mind and body as profoundly interlinked, and the natural world as a site for bringing them into greater harmony.

At the same time that Skidan registers a concern with the human body and the natural world, she also embraces twenty-first-century network technologies. The three screens constitute a site of displacement for the artist—herself a Russian émigré—and reference a contemporary diasporic condition in which connection with friends, family, and professional colleagues increasingly happens remotely. The vertical format of these screens itself references the hyperconnected logic of contemporary social media, just as her sensual, even erotic tableaux reference the slightly awkward dance of public intimacy and disclosure these media reward.

Valence, 2024, by Harrison Pearce, also invites us into a cave of sorts, yet it holds not the prehuman past but an inhuman future. Located in a dark, acoustically dampened space, the installation features ten anodized aluminum cages holding basketball-size blobs of white silicone and tangles of fluid-filled tubes. As pneumatic pistons intermittently prod these inchoate forms, an immersive, hauntingly beautiful soundscape fills the space. The genesis of the project was a (mis)diagnosis Pearce received for a brain tumor;endless inconclusive examinations had left only this topographically smooth rendering of the site of investigation as his guide. 

The soundscape, itself influenced by the percussive, irregular rhythms of MRI scans, activates the pistons, which gently press the silicone forms at varying intervals and with varying degrees of intensity. At the same time, sounds from these strikes, and the rattling of their containers, is fed back into the score, modulating it, and further affecting the kinetic environment. Pearce here produces a dynamic choreography of almost ritualistic medical investigation—an ecosystem of sonic form in which human depths are gently but insistently prodded under the pressure of technological and scientific exploration. 

Marina Rosenfeld’s two-channel video µ (mu), 2024—the sole piece discussed here not installed at the main pavilion—takes us deep into the infrastructure of sound through a hyper-magnification of its material conditions. Using microscopic cameras, her twinned video screens provide different perspectives and magnifications of the surface of a dubplate, while the multichannel audio evinces a similarly “microscopic” attention to the sounds made by the stylus and the record itself as manipulated by hand. 

Rosenfeld has long employed the dubplate as a medium for her sonic explorations.  As distinct from vinyl records, dubplates are like a camera negative—a unique, intermediary impression typically originally used for mastering but which became a signature element of reggae and later UK club music. These prototype impressions were often customized to afford DJs a unique “signature.” Rosenfeld evokes this history of personalization by employing the dubplate’s surface as a distinct audiovisual realm. The two videos, showing her moving the plate by hand, observe the ways in which the stylus both tracks and modifies the surface, while the soundtrack similarly articulates a realm of “microsound” that emanates from this process. As such, both aspects of her audiovisual performance seek to limn the edges of the audible realm. 

The Greek character in her title is also the symbol for a micron, or one-millionth of a meter, deriving from the Greek mikros. In The Zoomable Universe, astrobiologist Caleb Scharf denotes this as the beginning of “the undergrowth”: the scale of the animal cell to the bacterium that supports all animal, plant, and fungal life on earth. A record groove is 30µm deep, the size of the eukaryotic cell. As such, Rosenfeld’s work remains in the realm of the human, but her chosen scale describes a human limit, in both vision and essence. The material foundation of sound is reimagined as a rich field of both individual articulation and social encounter.

Together, these works describe a field of contemporary art ever more intent on exploring the natural world in and through its technological mediation, to reveal the micro- and macroscopic geographies and timescales occluded by anthropic perception. As distinct from earlier eras of ecological art, they manifest modern technology not solely as an impediment, but as a necessary prosthesis with which to reimagine our deeply fractured relationship to a living, nonhuman world, and to confront the fragility of our continued existence within it. And in contrast with earlier eras of systems aesthetics, they are no longer solely concerned with human institutions and conventions but in the difficult but necessary exploration of a more encompassing sphere of life beyond the human. 

Andrew V. Uroskie is associate professor of modern art and media at Stony Brook University, State University of New York.