Sorawit Songsataya at Busan Biennale
The Govett-Brewster team extends our congratulations to artist Sorawit Songsataya, whose works Ranad (2024) and Body Language (2024) are featured in this year’s Busan Biennale, alongside their work Shoulders of Giants (2023) and a new installation.
The Biennale is on show until 20 October in Busan, South Korea.
Ranad and Body Language were commissioned by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery this year for Songsataya’s exhibition with Maata Wharehoka Fibrous Soul (2 Mar–16 June 2024) and were generously gifted to the Gallery’s permanent collection by the artist.
Both works belong to a broader body investigation by the artist considering sound and its relation to duration and memory. Treating sound as a dynamic, living force, Songsataya’s works explore the ways ephemeral vibrations and utterances find themselves translated into visual form.
Titled “Seeing in the Dark,” the 2024 Busan Biennale is curated by Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte and includes works by 62 artists. The Biennale’s theme is imagined in the mental space between notions of ‘pirate enlightenment’ on the one hand and ‘Buddhist enlightenment on the other.’ The curators write, “We consider these spaces as offering an alternative to the demands for transparency by the surveillance-industrial complex. We liken artistic activity to the fugitive strategy of deception as a way to invoke what theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call ‘fugitive enlightenment’. We see tactics of operating surreptitiously as part of ‘another tradition of cultural experiment, and of perversion’.”