ARTEXT : La Biennale di Venezia
55 Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte
Giardini di Castello - Corea 

To Breathe: Bottari
Kimsooja

The notion of bottari (bundle) as a whole and totality and the concept of sewing have been the central components of Kimsooja's work for over three decades. Posing various questions about the formal aspects of tableau, sculpture, object and installation, bottari encompasses issues of body, self and others and the relationship of yin and yang to life and death. Bottari explores problems of location and dislocation, migration, exile, and war, while posing existential and cognitive questions in space and time

Approaching the architecture of the Korean Pavilion as a bottari, the division between nature and the interior space is wrapped with a transluscent film, treating the windows as the skin of the pavilion that diffracts the natural sunlight into rainbow spectrums of light, as it showers the interior space.
The intensity of the light in the pavilion will correspond to the daily movement of the sun rising to its setting across the Korean Pavilion which is located right next to the Laguna di Venezia transforming the space into a transcendental experience folding and unfolding the phenomenon of light.

To Breathe: Bottari presents the empty space of the Pavilion, inviting only the bodies of the audience to encounter the infinite reflections of light and sound. The artist's amplified inhaling, exhaling and humming performance sound (The Weaving Factory, 2004-2013) fills the air, transforming the pavilion into a breathing bottari.
The artist invites audiences to be the live and active performers, experiencing a personal sensation and awareness that reveals the extremes of light and darkness, sound and soundlessness, the known and the unknown. This installation questions visual knowledge as the known and darkness as the unknown that originates from human ignorance through two visual extremes that are connected as part of a whole. The Korean Pavilion will become a physical and psychological sanctuary, questioning the conditions of civilization in this era.

- Could you speak about the relationship between the place of the body (the performative posture) and the geographical place?

- KS : You can imagine zooming in, how a body of a needle engages a field of fabric. Precisely, the mobility of my body comes to represent the immobility of it, locating it in different geographies and socio-cultural contexts. Immobility can only be revealed by mobility, and vice versa. Constant interaction between the mobility of people on the street and the immobility of my body in-situ are activated during the course of the performance depending on the context of the society, the people, nature of the city and that of the streets. Different elements inhabit in-situ as the nature of the city and the presence of my body appear as an accumulated container of my own gaze towards humanity and other gazes in reaction to my body. While the decision to choose and arrive to the location is based on populations, conflicts, culture, economy and history, the decision of a performance in immobility arrived all of a sudden, like thunder or a Zen moment where energetic conflict between the extreme mobility of the outer world and a vortex of silence in my mind fell into my body.
I've always had a desire to present the reality of the world as it is, by presenting bodies, objects and nature without manipulating or making something new. Instead, I expect my own experiences and those of my audience to reveal new perceptions of the reality of the world and the reality of our existence. I pose ontological questions by juxtaposing my body and outer world in relational condition' to space/body and time/consciousness.

Curatori : Seungduk Kim
Artisti : Kimsooja

Web site: http://www.koreanpavilion2013.com/main.html