The Korean Pavilion
in Venice Architecture Biennale 2023
2086: Together How
The Korean Pavilion, 2013. Image courtesy Arts Council Korea.
Press Tour: Thursday, 18 May 2023 | 12pm
Opening Ceremony: Thursday, 18 May 2023 | 4:15pm
Curated by Artistic Directors Soik Jung and Kyong Park
Commissioned by ARKOKOREA Arts Council Korea (ARKO)
20 May – 26 November 2023
Giardini della Biennale,
Castello 1260 30122 Venezia, Italia
https://korean-pavilion.or.kr/
@arkokorea
https://www.labiennale.org/en/news/biennale-architettura-2023-laboratory-future-0
Why are we so “isolated” when we are supposed to be so “connected”—through the globalization of information, finance, commodities, and even in culture? Why are we so insecure about our future when so many of us are living at unprecedented levels of wealth, technologies, mobility, and consumption? How did we get to this point of abundance in absence? How can we bridge the contradictions that are driving us toward extinction?
2086” asks how we might live together in the year when our global population is supposed to peak. It posits that we need to realize a biocultural revolution if we are going to endure the unimaginable levels of environmental crises to come, which have already begun. Starting with three communities in South Korea, “2086” imagines a more empathetic, reflective, and restrained life in a new ecosphere.
Banwol Archipelago, NHDM Architects, 2023. Digital on paper, courtesy of N H D M Architects.
The exhibition is enriched with a participatory video game, and a series of multidisciplinary installations that encompass photographs, drawings, models, video and architectural installations.
The Korean Pavilion invites audiences to imagine an ecocultural revolution through a critical reassessment of our capitalist, globalist, and colonial history.
The exhibition, 2086: Together How?, focuses on three small communities engaged in active regeneration projects in South Korea, each varying in population, history and characteristics: inside the global city of Incheon; the colonial historic centre in the mid-size city of Gunsan; and in the rural areas largely resided by migrant workers in the Gyeonggi Province.
According to curators, “these locations constitute a cross section of urbanization, modernization, and westernization in South Korea.”
Soik Jung and Kyong Park. Photo by Nam Yun Jung. The Korean Pavilion presents 2086: Together How?
A team of architects and community leaders have worked with local communities and carried out collaborative research activities, framed by a set of dialectics that have been determinant factors in our ecocultural evolution; for example, how to balance individualism and communalism in future society.
“Each community is a case study which utilizes the community leader’s deep knowledge of the place and the architect’s spatial analysis to evaluate its current state, and propose site- specific future scenarios leading up to 2086,” said Soik Jung, the Artistic Director of the exhibition.
Arts Council Korea (ARKO), the Commissioner of the Korean Pavilion that commissioned the foundation of the pavilion itself, is a governmental agency under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, dedicated to supporting and promoting Korean arts and culture.
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