Alexander Ferrando: The 2010 Gwangju Biennale will include 100-plus artists from no fewer than 28 countries and exhibit ‘cultural artifacts’ alongside artworks that have been realized between 1901 and 2010. Why the inclusion of these artifacts and what criteria did you have when selecting them?

Massimiliano Gioni: One of the first images I stumbled upon while doing research for this biennial were the photographs shot in the Tuol Sleng Prison in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. They depicted people who had been imprisoned: the photos had been taken a few days or a few hours before they’d be executed. Those photographs are not art works and their status is quite complicated as they were shot by a soldier working for the regime. So they are incredibly complex images from both an aesthetic and ethical point of view: they illustrate how intricate images can be. Most importantly those images were literally ultimate images, the last – in many cases the only – images that preserved the memory of the lives of those people.

The encounter with those images made me realize that if we want to look at how we relate to images then we can not only look at art works: we have to look also elsewhere because it is often in fields other than art that new kinds of images are being produced and consumed. Also, if you look back at the many art historians who have attempted to write a history of images – think of Aby Warburg or, more recently, David Freedberg – you soon realize that they have looked at the totality of images out there, mixing masterpieces and commercial imagery. 

That’s how I slowly developed the idea of including other objects that are strictly speaking not art works, but that I believe have an extraordinary intensity that needs to be preserved and shared. The show doesn’t proceed chronologically and it is not systematic in the exploration of more than 100 years of history: it rather proceeds by samplings or by providing pieces of evidence. So those artifacts or non-artistic images have been chosen because they provided evidence of a certain relationship between humans and images.

Another important inspiration for the biennale was the collection of Ydessa Hendeles and her Teddy Bear Project, which will be an exhibition within the exhibition: the Teddy Bear Project is a collection of over 3000 photos of people holding teddy bears and of actual teddy bears. In this case you have another conflation of high and low, of art and non-art. It is a project that reveals how we can project feeling onto inanimate objects, which is the basic function of idols and images alike.

I am using examples from the past, but I think you just need to pick up your smart phone to realize that probably the most radical changes in the way we relate to images often happen outside the art world.

Then again, don’t imagine this exhibition to be completely unbalanced towards cultural artifacts and found images: artists and art works play the central role. In many cases it’s the artists themselves who are using or recycling images that come from the world out there. After all, another major shift in this century is that the distinction between consumers and producers of images has grown thinner and thinner and hopefully the show will also address this change.

AF: The theme of this year’s biennale is meant to “[investigate] the relationships that bind people to images and images to people.” How do you think this relationship has evolved since 1901 and why is it a crucial topic for this biennial?

MG: This sounds probably way too ambitious, but I think that the topic is crucial for humanity itself. We are the only animals who can fabricate images. And if you look back at the history of art, you can easily describe it as a history of people looking at people, of eyes looking at bodies and faces. Making images of ourselves seems to be a fundamental need for humans, maybe simply because it’s the only way we have to try and defy the passing of time. Regis De Bray – who wrote this great book titled The Life and Death of Image – said that images are fundamentally an attempt to overcome death.

Even if you don’t want to be too philosophical about it, you have to admit that the production and consumption of images is today probably the largest industry in the world. Every second, thousands and thousands of new images are produced, shared, circulated: millions of images are uploaded every day on the Internet. On many levels, artists have completely lost any centrality in the way images are made, shared, and exchanged. Even from an economical point of view, consider that the copyright for the reproduction of one image of a celebrity can cost much more than the most expensive art works out there. With the exhibition "10,000 Lives" I wanted to investigate this obsession, this need we seem to have, this desire to make images of our loved ones and ourselves. And I also wanted to try and create an exhibition that in the sheer quantity of works and images could compete with the amount of images we see and consume every day.

1901 was not chosen as a symbolic date: it simply turned out to be the date in which Ye Jinglu – a Chinese man who had himself photographed every year for 62 years – was photographed for the first time. In the exhibition we will present his album of photos, and so that date became an ideal starting point: it’s the start of a century but, more importantly, it is the moment in which we are given the possibility of meeting a person through the photographic traces he left behind. It is always difficult to quote Susan Sontag as she has almost become a pop idol, but as she said: “To live is to be photographed.” That could be the subtitle of the exhibition.

AF: The title, 10,000, derives from the Korean author Ku Un’s 30-volume poem Maninbo (10,000 Lives). How does this title and reference reflect the artworks in the exhibition?

MG: The exhibition is about the images we leave behind us, during our lifetime. It’s about the traces we leave in the icono-sphere, to use a very 1960s term. But it is also about the life of images themselves. As W.J.T. Mitchell said, images today have become so present and pervasive that we have to ask ourselves not what we want from them, but what they want from us.

The title 10.000 Lives seemed to be able to unite these two different subtexts which are present in the show, that’s why I chose it: and the number in the title immediately suggests an idea of proliferation; it emphasizes the explosion of images that is taking place in our societies.

More importantly, Ko Un started his masterpiece – which is basically a giant collection of portraits in words – while he was in prison and tried to remember every single person he met in his life. So 10.000 Lives also refers to the power of images to act as sites of remembrance and memorials. Many works in the show will explore this dimension, from the 103 sculptures of the Rent Collection Courtyard to the posters of the Jihad collected by Useful Photography or the films of Liu Wei, just to quote randomly.

AF: This is the eighth edition of the biennale but also the 30th anniversary of the Gwangju Democratic Uprising in which the authoritarian government of Chun Doo-hwan repressed the mass demonstrations that took place in the city in 1980. In what ways did this history influence your conception of the biennale’s theme?

MG: Borrowing Ko Un’s book as the title for the exhibition is a conscious reference to the 1980s events, as Ko Un was arrested for his participation in the Democratic Movement. But the writer himself often insisted on the need to keep politics and literature separated: he said that poetry is the song of history. It is related to it, but it is first and foremost a song and should remain such.

The idea of devoting an exhibition to the images of the people we lost is very much influenced by the repression of the Uprising and by seeing the portraits of the victims. But then again I didn’t want to turn the exhibition into a funeral.

Instead I tried to turn this biennial into something different from just a list of hot names or an exploration of trends: 10.000 Lives is conceived as a thematic exhibition or, better, as a temporary museum. I made a conscious effort to go after very specific and beautiful pieces. After all the best way to celebrate an anniversary is to bring together some great artworks and to see them all together.

The connection with the 1980s event also means that the Gwangju biennale is widely popular and very much related to civic society – on a good day it gets more than 10.000 visitors: so I have also attempted to think of a show with a multiplicity of possible readings and audiences.

Abbreviated version of  this interview was published in Flash Art no. 273 July – September 2010.