What can pirate utopias tell us about the future?

It doesn’t take long to realize that this year’s Busan Biennale, “Seeing in the Dark,” is fiercely, if not sometimes anxiously, political. Entering the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art – one of four venues hosting the biennale – I was transported back to Documenta 15 in 2022, with works by Indonesian “artivist” group Taring Padi and the Palestine and Belgium-based Subversive Film cohort . dominating the ground floor gallery. Both collectives participated in that year’s Documenta in Kassel, where they faced accusations of anti-Semitism – and, in the case of Taring Padi, saw a work removed – amid public protests against the controversial exhibition.

Two years later, with Israel waging a brutal war against Gaza – and now against its neighbors – following the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become even more tense. In Busan, I half expected to find protesters calling for the removal of “pro-Palestinian” and “anti-Zionist” art. But there were no pickets or demonstrations.

Of course, Busan is not Kassel; South Korea does not bear the same enormous weight of national guilt as Germany over the serious atrocities committed against the Jewish people. However, Taring Padi’s agitprop signs, made in collaboration with farm workers and repurposed to criticize rising rice prices following Indonesia’s 2024 general elections (Installation of Memedi Sawah/Scarecrow2024), felt strangely subdued. The installation’s empty stage and solitary microphones seemed to yearn for activation. Subversive Film’s powerful video – An assembly exercise (2023 – ongoing), which brings together archival footage of liberation movements in remote geographic regions including Palestine, Cuba and Vietnam – seemed almost ordinary, devoid of the expected political urgency. Instead of feeling relief at the lack of controversy, I felt uneasy – as if these works needed the animation of a famous cause and the histrionics of public debate resonate fully. However, ultimately, this biennial seeks to lift us out of the stagnation in how we see and experience our world.

Curated by Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte, ‘Seeing in the Dark’ takes inspiration from the posthumously published work of David Graeber Pirate Enlightenment or Real Libertalia (2022), which posits that ideas of democracy and enlightenment originated from autonomous pirate communities in 18th-century Madagascar. In fact, Graeber’s influence weighs heavily on the exhibition. At the HANSUNG1918 cultural center, Fight Club (2022), a video by Graeber’s widow Nika Dubrovsky, stages a dialogue between Thomas Hobbes (Jacques Servin from The Yes Men), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Savitri D from Church from Stop Shopping) and Graeber (Jamie Kelsey-Fry from Global Assembly and Extinction Rebellion). They ruminate on notions of property and social contract: a playful display that reinforces the idea that concepts emerge from dialogue rather than individual thought.

Although the biennale’s title suggests that ideas can often form within the long shadows cast by the West over non-aligned territories, I interpret it as a determined effort to unearth truths from the ever-widening void of misinformation and violent currents of time. Also showing at HANSUNG1918 is Hong Jin-hwon’s thought-provoking hour-long documentary melting ice cream (2021). Featuring restored archival film from the People’s Camera Collective, it revisits student and temporary worker protests in the 1980s during The democratization of South Korea movement.

Back to Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Hong’s Double Slit (2024), another feature filmRy, is presented in a cinema-like space that closely examines the struggles of Hyundai Heavy Industries’ subcontractor union in the early 2000s. Together, these works trace how revolutionary movements can quickly become consumed by neoliberal ideals. They foreshadow a future in which progressive thought requires constant protection, just like this exhibition itself – a laboratory where progressive politics can thrive freely, free from the weight of condemnation.

2024 Busan Biennale,’Seeing in the dark‘, runs until October 20th

^{Main image: John Vea, Finish this week and that’s it! 2014, five-channel video. Courtesy: the artist}