Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte to Co-curate Busan Biennale

Spotlight Busan Biennale 2022 Rises Upon Unexpected Waves Sujin Jung

Busan Metropolitan City and the Busan Biennale Organising Committee this week announced that New Zealand’s Vera Mey and Belgium’s Philippe Pirotte will co-curate next year’s Busan Biennale.

Mey is juggling several roles at present, acting as an independent curator, curating for Auckland‘s Te Tuhi gallery, and working on a PhD in the History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS University of London.

She previously worked at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and has co-curated exhibitions including SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, which was held at Mori Art Museum and National Art Center Tokyo in 2017.

Pirotte is an art history professor at the Städelschule school of art in Frankfurt am Main, an associate curator with the Gropius-Bau in Berlin, and adjunct senior curator at the University of California Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley.

Ocula Magazine caught up with Mey shortly after she arrived in Korea.

Your proposal was made with Philippe Pirotte. What’s your relationship with him?

Philippe and I shared overlapping research interests which we first conversed about when he was co-curator of the 2017 Jakarta Biennale. We further worked as part of a research colloquium he set up in his roles at the Berkeley Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Städelschule. The project was called The Colour Curtain and the Promise of Bandung and looked at the different intersections between politics and aesthetics stemming from the Bandung 1955 Asia Africa Conference. It has been such a productive and interesting collaboration that we decided to work together on a proposal for the Busan Biennale.

For Busan, we’re also working with Korea-based Suzy Park as Associate Curator, who was part of a fascinating activist collective called Funny Revenge.

It’s wonderful to share a project like this with people you trust and whose work you admire. It can be rare to have people so on the same page, with your thinking and research, so when you find them, it’s good to work together.

According to press materials shared by the Biennale, your proposal ‘adopts specific cultural and spiritual ways of living in the world as an exhibition motif, while also amply reflecting the defining characteristics of Busan. Additionally, it considers the use of everyday spaces in the city and different forms of partnership with local alternative spaces, social activists, culture and art groups, and institutions.’ That sounds like most biennials to me. What will be unique about yours?

It was a very vague description, wasn’t it? I’m very aware that most biennales can sound so same-same. We’re still keeping mum about our exact concept and title but can share that we wanted to both avoid themes that were too vague and all-encompassing as is often the case. These ideas lose meaning when it’s a catch all trope or theme and become dangerously essentialist. My recent PhD training has cautioned me against the unspecific.

Over our discussions, we were hugely informed by a few concepts and ideas. The first stemming from David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment or the Real Libertalia (2023) and notions of Buddhist Enlightenment as spiritual and cosmological ascendancy. At the moment we’re thinking about intersections between the two and how they are both a challenge to the idea of the Enlightenment era of the Modern, particularly in European discourse.

We’re also sensitive to the idea that both Pirate Enlightenment and Buddhist Enlightenment propose in terms of a radical inclusivity that is rooted in encounter of difference, negotiation of belief, and above all, fairness and equality.

I’m hugely inspired by the work that continues through the David Graeber Institute and by his and Nika Dubrovsky’s idea of the Visual Assembly. —[O]

Main image: Vera Mey. Photo: © Christa Holka, 2024.