You hear the work before you see it: voices spilling out of Space OneZ, a portside warehouse on Yeongdo Island in the south of Busan, mingling with traffic and the thuds and clanks of vessels at the nearby harbor. Within the venue, the air thickens with overlapping a cappella voices emanating from a circle of speakers on spindly stands. A jagged section feels like a packed train filled with anxious mouth-breathers (\u201cI can feel the friction \/ frick \/ frick your friction\u201d), before opening into a tranquilizing wash of hymnal chords that bathe the listener in silvery harmonies (\u201calways becoming, becoming, becoming \u2026 I become the sea \u2026 I am the sea\u2026\u201d).<\/p>\n
Devised with a local women\u2019s choir, this evocative work is part of Jota Momba\u00e7a\u2019s installation\u00a0drowning is not a poem, but it\u2019s not not a poem either (song of the siren). Speaking of fracture and communion, this newly commissioned work appears in this year\u2019s sound-heavy Busan Biennale, \u201cDissident Chorus,\u201d which explores how \u201cembodied and sonic practices can become tools for communication, healing, and resistance,\u201d as the press materials put it. Drawing on protest songs, rap, Afrofuturist techno, music by visually impaired teenagers, motivational chants by trans women, and field recordings of dripping water, the show explores \u201chow sound, like water, resists containment.\u201d It is an uneven biennial, more conceptually focused and powerful in its off-sites than in the main venue, the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art. Yet its clear ideological positioning\u2014an open celebration of underdogs and dissent\u2014makes it an accidental foil to the political quarrels plaguing the concurrent Gwangju Biennale<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cDissident Chorus\u201d takes a stand. At its most confident, it uses sound\u2019s entanglements\u2014from leakages between adjoining gallery spaces to its power to structure space and mobilize bodies\u2014to celebrate all sorts of disobedience, civil or otherwise. Its ambitions, unfolding in a trio of \u201cmovements\u201d across three spaces, are most fully realized at Space OneZ and the disused Busan Nam High School, where the works resonate particularly well with their surroundings.<\/p>\n The six-artist showcase at Space OneZ taps into Busan\u2019s maritime culture and the stories and histories held by the open seas. A sailor\u2019s life unfolds in Joar Songcuya\u2019s colorful paintings of commercial ships and swirling reds and blues that evoke nautical and emotional weather. The motif of the deep ocean as a place of transformation continues in Julien Creuzet\u2019s video installation ZUMBI ZUMBI ETERNO (2023), which reclaims the legacy of Zumbi dos Palmares, a leading figure of anti-colonial resistance in Brazil. Playing on Zumbi\/zombie, Creuzet sings a jazzy song-poem referring to Haitian Vodou, while an animated human body drifts through the ocean with pufferfish and datura flowers, both purported ingredients in zombification.<\/p>\n Farther south, at the former Busan Nam High School, we learn from rogue teachers and bad students. Artist-activist collective Ultra-red\u2019s Protocols for Collective Listening, adapted from installations made across different cities from 2009 to \u201911, offers guidelines for organizing soundwalks and listening sessions on texts pinned to the wall (pro tip for community fieldwork: \u201cProvide plenty of food\u201d). In every classroom the works occupy, tables and chairs are arranged to encourage different relations: in one, chairs form a spiral; in another, they are stacked in a crazy pile like a barricade against invading zombies (perhaps a nod to the Korean passion for the undead in TV and cinema). Fatima Kaleem Khan\u2019s appropriation of the \u201cbad woman\u201d archetype in South Asian TV serials becomes a cheerfully malevolent assemblage of sour, sneering, side-eyeing protagonists painted on canvases and cereal boxes on study desks (Spilt Milk, 2026)\u2014mean girls with flowing hair described in a video poem-manifesto, playing on a standalone screen next to the classroom\u2019s blackboard, as \u201cglorious, vengeful, demure.\u201d<\/p>\n Heaven Baek\u2019s extraordinary video installation Grass-Grown Corps Over the Sea and the Mountains (2026) rewrites the story of uncompensated Korean wartime laborers conscripted into labor by the Japanese during World War II. Its title comes from the ultranationalist Japanese military anthem \u201cUmi Yukaba\u201d: \u201cIf I go to sea, \/ Let me become a water-washed corpse; \/ If to the mountains, \/ A grass-grown corpse.\u201d Drawing on oral testimonies of the Joseon Women\u2019s Volunteer Labour Corps, Baek reverses the original song\u2019s stoic death drive into a bittersweet celebration of resilience. Catchy electropop accompanies images of black kelp, military bunkers, and an elderly veteran, while text excerpts of the oral testimonies convey the women\u2019s plucky aspirations before they knew the brutal reality of unpaid munitions-factory labor: \u201cI shall return safe! Let us go to win!\u201d Doomed though they are, these hopes eventually open up to a joyful vision of eternity: \u201cDancing corps \/ Forever and forever \/ farther and farther.\u201d<\/p>\n Given the resonant, site-specific frequencies established at these venues, the curation at the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art feels more staid and generic. Alongside sound and social action are familiar curatorial tropes\u2014ancestral knowledge, speculative worlds, subcultural practices\u2014and a few needlessly large installations for visual drama. Still, there are potent moments, almost all of them sound-led. Zahra Malkani\u2019s video installation The Wanderers Taught Me Longing, the Mystics Taught Me Lament (2026) features lullabies and sacred songs speaking elliptically of brutality and traditions of resistance. \u201cListen,\u201d read the final lines of text, set against footage of birds wheeling in a gray sky. \u201cAll the splendors of love and joy \/ All the wealth in these streets \/ Until it is not all ours \/ There is no rest.\u201d The words are accompanied by a dull, slow drumbeat that, almost against one\u2019s will, rocks one\u2019s body back and forth, back and forth; it is the rhythm of devotion and endurance, a score for the unfinished business of struggle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You hear the work before you see it: voices spilling out of Space OneZ, a portside warehouse on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":630775,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9108,5471,146,85,46,409,10576,9161],"class_list":["post-630774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-biennials","tag-democracy","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music","tag-public-space","tag-sound-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=630774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=630774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=630774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=630774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}