DEFNE AYAS AND NATASHA GINWALA
Defne Ayas has served as a director and curator at several cultural institutions and research initiatives across the world. Currently, she is the artistic director of Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning, as well as curator at large for V-A-C Foundation in Moscow and Venice. Natasha Ginwala is a curator and writer. She is associate curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin and artistic director of COLOMBOSCOPE, Colombo. Frequent collaborators, together they are artistic directors of the 13th Gwangju Biennale 2021, postponed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Interview by Thomas RouechéPortrait by Victoria Tomaschko
Thomas Roueché When did you start to work on the Gwangju Biennale? I want to get a sense of the time frame because it’s been such an eventful year.
Defne Ayas I don’t even remember any more!
Natasha Ginwala We were approached in January 2019 to make the proposal together. Then we had to seriously consider it, keeping in mind this mega-biennial dynamic, about which we were already suspicious, and realising all of the complexities awaiting us. By the time we submitted the proposal it was February; in March we made our first trip to Korea and by then we already had certain intuitions about venues and interests, which stayed very much alive and anchored much of our early process. So that’s basically the timeline all the way up to now. It has been a two-year process, which is rare for biennials.
TR I suppose the pandemic happened fairly late on in your organisation and preparations?
DA It’s really interesting how it evolved. Natasha and I met in Berlin and prepared our proposal. We were very clear with what we were going to do: we were going to look at the spectrum of intelligence. We are really enamoured with the work of Catherine Malabou, so we were going to look at the labour of the brain in this global capitalist landscape and do a feminism reader. We were going to look at the aesthetics of solidarity, and because of the legacy of the [1980] Gwangju Uprising have a reader on feminism, and we wanted to look at the topic of intelligence – what is living in us, what is foreign in us that can benefit us, what can we learn from organisms. This was all before the pandemic. I think that we have a very intuitive way of tapping into the times and developing our concepts. I like to say that our concept has been “Covid-proof” – Natasha doesn’t like how that sounds – but in a way the cracks have deepened and everything that we have been going after has become more relevant than ever. We have not steered away from where we started in any way. Of course, when the pandemic hit we had to readjust. We had to look at certain logistical realities, how it impacted three artist commissions that were to take place in Jeju, what it meant for some artists – for some it actually worked better because they had more time – and what it meant for budget, shipping, the boring stuff of exhibitions, not the intellectual but the practical side. In terms of the way we were working and what we were going after framework-wise, it actually made it more relevant. We became enthused and more motivated by our programme than we had perhaps been at the outset. We felt like we were in tune, we were on it, we were coming up with solutions for every artist as they were needed; we were listening to everyone, including ourselves. Natasha is in quarantine right now in fact, so you have the opportunity to speak to an esteemed curator in quarantine.
TR I meant to ask – where are you both now and where were you through 2020?
NG I am now in Seoul, in a very central part of the city, on the 15th floor of a hotel, on my 5th day of quarantine out of 14. I have not seen any humans whatsoever, except from the window. All of the food is left outside in a basket and all of the announcements are in four languages and they take place eight times a day through the speakers that you hear in the hotel room. There’s a lot to think about in terms of the great disembodiment of our times. A lot of what we are looking at is the embodiment of intelligence, all the paradoxes of the embodiment of intelligence. That includes the oppression of knowledge, the erasure of certain kinds of knowledge formations, whether that’s through colonialism, policing or digital surveillance. So, in a sense we’re holding together a lot of sensory intelligence and somatic practices, as well as this kind of digital acceleration that has just been further deepened and created further divides during the pandemic.
DA I’m in Berlin, and I am a mother, and this is a topic that is never talked about. Here schools are closed and it’s home-schooling until 15 February, so my daughter has to be swapped between Jitsy and Zoom and Sway and PDFs and links and multiple meetings and online music and art supplies that need to be supplied for paintings made from toilet rolls. It’s like a gorgeous catastrophe for a six-year-old who doesn’t know how to read. She has to be constantly plugged into this awful world. We may be pessimistic about what Zoom is doing to all of us, but to see a six-year-old’s brain being formed and basically interrupted is so painful. Of course, when we have an interview with Catherine Malabou, she has a wonderful dialectical way of reading what this disembodied remote working might be doing to our brains: it may not be so pessimistic; we have to adjust our brains; it needs to be more complicated; we’re not all becoming little cyborg pets, we’re better than that; we just have to train our brains. That all sounds great, but when I actually see this little brain being formed on Zoom, it’s amazing. This is when the brain is a disco ball! It’s a disco ball in the shaping. It’s phenomenal. What it does to her is more disconcerting. That’s the landscape I am operating in – do I have time to reflect on it? No. We’re in a very forward-facing motion to deliver Asia’s largest biennial; Natasha and I have been way too committed, more dedicated, as if we are fighting with our lives. Because for both of us there is basically no boundary within art and life. For the theme: Korea has been more prepared than anybody to deploy its legal tools to enable the surveillance machine. It is much more equipped than any other country has been. But when it comes to gender issues, when it comes to patriarchal structures, when it comes to corruption, when it comes to bureaucratic entanglement, it is a very complex place. Natasha and I have been tuning in, with our amazing curatorial team, to how artists’ lives have been shaped by the pandemic. Each one of them has had to deal with location change, studio change, giving birth, losing teaching jobs, taking care of elderly parents. Each person has experienced a different combination of intergenerational dilemma.
NG It’s not that artists are directly responding to the pandemic as a topic, but it’s in their lives. When something becomes part of the atmosphere, how does it penetrate the formation of your work? If it’s genuine, it’s not going to be a topic; it’s not going to be that catchphrase. And that’s what’s been brilliant. The artists haven’t said, “Oh, my work is not relevant and I have another proposal to make”; they’ve simply stayed in the moment, stayed with their responsibilities.
TR I’m sure that the biennial as a form was something that you were suspicious of, especially at a time of institutional critiques within the art world.
DA We did not expect to be so challenged. We knew that the Gwangju Biennale was a rite of passage for many curators who we regard highly, from Jessica Morgan to Okwui Enwezor to Hou Hanru. We knew it was a big machine we were taking on, navigating the mechanics of bureaucracy, which also includes elements of capitalism in the sense of outsourcing, bids, tenders. Not every biennial functions the same way, but there are so many elements of biennial-making that are invisible. We are really dealing with a municipal machine, with all of its invisible hands of bureaucracy. On a daily basis we are engaging with clauses in agreements, how to get outsourced logistical partners to talk to each other through yet another outsourced entity. It is so bureaucratic the machine we are dealing with. With the pandemic and the delay and what it meant vis-à-vis our budget and city budgets and accounting, these are really the unappetising aspects of biennial-making, but these are things that artistic directors at the Gwangju Biennale are expected to work with.
NG In terms of the content and the approach, we had already invited all the artists participating in the biennial by January 2020, before the pandemic. We have been working with these artists for a year already. Sometimes you hear that biennial artists have been invited at the very last minute, three months before the opening, six months before the opening, but our engagement in that sense has been steadfast. We tried to preconceive what could we do with this accelerated timeline and then we got six months extra because of the postponement. But we already used this one year to factor certain things into the process of working with artists. There are 69 artists, so it is already countering the kind of scale that the Gwangju Biennale has been known to have. So, we are not talking about over 200 artists; we are talking about a very tight group, including thinkers, activists and journalists, for this stage, which has a forum. Editorial strategies are important to us; it’s not art for art’s sake. And that’s important because we are dealing with these quite contrasting worlds of intelligence whether that’s coming from dealing with certain languages of indigeneity or sovereignty, to certain very complex kinds of digital labour. We don’t separate them. The narration or the practices of narration are also very important to us, so we really see the biennial hall and the accompanying venues as each having titles and a certain narrative plot. Of course, it’s going to be very difficult because a certain amount of it is going to be virtual for the international audiences, but we did think about what kind of formation we were building. Our exhibition architect has been on board since day one, challenging the dogmatic white cube sensibility of the space and turning it into something that is way more tactile. It breaks down the logic of the grid as well.
DA From the outset we’ve been engaging with what is living and what is dead – aspects of mourning and afterlife, spirit objects and how to give dead people their humanity. What is living, what is inanimate? We have this whole discussion within technology right now through the work of say, Yuk Hui, which looks for more plural, heterodox ancestries for the meaning of techne, so can we look at non-Western sources, cosmologies, demons and spirits, to have a more plural understanding of technology that’s not only Silicon Valley driven. So that plural language as it might be in shamanistic worlds or matriarchal cultures, that is something we are drawing in to create a multiplicity of understanding of vocabularies that are being presented to understand where we are in terms of our co-evolution with artificial intelligence. Through organic and inorganic intelligence, how can we create a more complex understanding of what intelligence is, drawing on Korean visual culture, from cultures across Asia, as well as indigenous communities, whether it’s in New Zealand or the Sami in Sweden and Finland? ◉