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Guide to “You Must Change Your Life”
Inspired by the final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, the 16th Gwangju Biennale explores how new capacities and forms of life emerge through artistic practice.
In Rilke’s 1908 poem, a fragment of an ancient sculpture releases within its viewer an overwhelming surge of emotional energy, culminating in the injunction: “You must change your life.” Yet the poem offers no prescription. Transformation remains open—urgent, but not yet determined. Taking inspiration from this imperative, the Biennale approaches change not as a destination but as a method: a process through which matter, bodies, perceptions, and relations are continually reorganised.
Change is often most immediately visible to us in moments of rupture and crisis. Yet change also unfolds quietly and unnoticed, like the changes in faces of the loved ones we see daily. And change also unfolds through the accumulation of our everyday acts and rituals as they accumulate to practices of repetition that brings about difference and. It is through such practices that we expand our capacity to affect—and to be affected.
A central proposition of this Biennale is that change is sustained through practice. But in order to be generative, any practice must be sustainable enough to repeat across multiple scales of life. Repetition is what shapes how we perceive, how we relate, and how we live. As such living models of persistence and experimentation, artistic practices appear here as cumulative techniques through which individuals and communities embody their experiences of transformation.
Exhibition Section
Gallery 1 (G1): Molecules and Me
Molecules and Me is a flooded landscape of molecular activity, where matter and the self are constantly dissolving, circulating, and recombining. The journey begins below the threshold of perception––from the molecule to the molecular individual and to swarms of molecules, forming a field of relations in constant flux across scales.
Gallery 2 (G2): Bodies and Bonds
Bodies and Bonds becomes a binary field, divided like a football pitch or table tennis table. Bodies face one another through a single line, touching and being touched, disciplining and being disciplined, caring and being cared for. Illness, intimacy, and repetition leave their marks on the body. Repetition may narrow a life, but can also remake one. The works in this gallery revolve around training––the athleticism of the body and the spirit––testing the capacities of the human form against the pressures of familial bonds.
Gallery 3 (G3): Landscapes and Learning
Landscapes and Learning opens into a forest, where knowledge takes root through cultivation, labor, and collective life. Cultivation runs both ways: people shape the land, and the land shapes those who inhabit it. Fields, schools, cities, and communities become the ground from which knowledge and ways of living grow and take shape. The works in this gallery reimagine the relationships between landscape and power.
Gallery 4 (G4): Cosmos and Change
Cosmos and Change darkens into a night landscape, passing through sleep, dreams, and visions of worlds beyond the human. Emerging from the darkness are moving images and geological presences opening onto planetary time and myth. The works in this gallery gather around diverse forms of bodies––ceramic bodies, volcanic ones, bodies acting as antennae––each a channel for ancestral dreams and visions of days to come.
Gallery 5 (G5): Air and Articulations
Air and Articulations is a landscape of air, scarcely recognizable as a room. There the exhibition is released into breath, sound, and language, closing the journey in open air. A deconstructed club environment turns the visitor’s breathing body into an instrument that both plays and is played.