Night after night in Gwangju, the fa d0ade of the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall ignites with James T. Hong9s Apologies (20123 8), an ever-expanding anthology of contrition by government officials and heads of state. Hong calls it a timeline of political progress as unrepentant recidivism and contrite repetition. The reel stretches from 1937 Japanese ambassador Hiroshi Saito regretting the sinking of the USS Panay to Willy Brandt kneeling before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising monument, and closes in 2023 with the Dutch king apologizing for his nation9s role in slavery. In a biennale titled You must change your life, the work surfaces a paradox: ceremonial penitence stages transformation even as it defers it.
The directive is lifted from the closing line of Rainer Maria Rilke9s 1908 sonnet Archaic Torso of Apollo. Artistic director Ho Tzu Nyen has described encountering the poem on an exhausted day and feeling an expanded capacity. With co-curators Gahee Park, Brian Kuan Wood, and Che Kyongfa, Ho treats change as layered across scales and tempos sometimes seismic, sometimes barely perceptible.
Molecules and Me
The opening section pools nearly two tons of pine resin across the floor in Goldin+Senneby9s Resin Pond (2026), a luminous amber slick that fuses toxin and sealant, wound and closure. Resin is energy-dense, terpene-rich, and harvestable for biodiesel and aviation fuel; the duo9s Jakob Senneby lives with multiple sclerosis, a condition of autoimmune assault on the nervous system, which has reoriented their scrutiny of capital9s absurdities. Nearby, clusters of volcanic rocks from Jeju compress unequal durationssediment, eruption, coolingwhile Sasaki Ken9s more than sixty small paintingsConverse sneakers, workers9 boots, a light switch, a tennis ball, and an ominously overcast Tokyo sky in the days after the 2011 T4hoku earthquakethread the spaces with the tempo of the everyday.
Maya Watanabe9s Liminal (2019), a single-channel projection produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation, offers extreme close-ups of human remains exhumed from mass graves of Peru9s internal armed conflict (19802000). Tens of thousands remain missing or nameless, and many crimes unacknowledged; the camera9s oscillation between focus and blur refuses closure.
Bodies, Bonds, and Beyond
In Bodies and Bonds, Mona Benyamin casts her parentswho lived through the mass displacements of Palestinians during the Nakba (1948) and the Naksa (1967)into a sitcom and a newscast. In Trouble in Paradise (2018), gallows humor lands over a canned laugh track ( How do you make a Palestinian cry? You kill his family ). In Tomorrow, Again (2023), the pair return as anchors and bystanders in a condition of perpetual emergency. Nearby, Amanda Heng9s Another Woman in Gwangju 1996, 2014, 2023 (2026) restages a motherdaughter portrait across three decades as roles of care reverse; Sohrab Hura9s Bittersweet (2019) and Life Is Elsewhere (20052011) chronicle life alongside a mother diagnosed with schizophrenia and her dog, Elsa, including a letter noting, As the years passed, I forgot all the reasons for not wanting her.
Cosmos and Change turns outward: Bhenji Ra9s Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon (2024) draws from pangalay, a dance of the Tausug of the Sulu Archipelago; Hura9s The Coast (2019) follows devotees of the goddess Kali on Tamil Nadu9s shores; and Saodat Ismailova9s Melted into the Sun (2024) trails The Veiled One across the Amu Darya, the Chillpiq burial ground, and a Soviet-era solar furnace.
The finale, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork9s Not Exactly BPM (Variation Rrose) (2026)commissioned by the 16th Gwangju Biennaleis a deconstructed nightclub of centrifugal blowers, feedback, and transparent, sound-absorbing inflatables that swell and exhale. A hypnotic score built with the psychoacoustic artist Rrose replaces euphoria with a low hum of anxiety under burnt-orange light. After so many propositions for change, this enclosure stages a pauseand leaves the question of return unresolved.
