Open Call: 2025 Gwangju Biennale Academy International Curator Course

Born out of Okwui Enwezor’s Global Institute(2008), the course began in 2009 and has worked with renowned curators such as Maria Lind and Ute Meta Bauer, producing 186 alumni over the past 15 years. Following the footsteps, this year’s course will be directed by Binna Choi, curator of the Hawai‘i Triennial 2025 and artistic director of the 2026 Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Choi presents the course with the theme “On Nationhood and Curatorial Practice.” Choi states, “On the condition of the ongoing legacy of colonialism and in the long aftermath of the euphoria of globalization, I believe the notion of nation holds a possibility for collective action embedded in collective memory, self-transformation, and the physicality of land, ocean, and other elements to make a place or ‘animal nation, plant nations,’ as much as its well-known, troubling problematics. Whereas art and curatorial practices cannot be fully free from it, they also can consciously and critically ‘take part’ in it, (re)create, (re)construct, and shape it together. Much of this possibility can be learned from genealogies of struggles for independence, sovereignty, or democracy, including the recent political unrest and resistance in South Korea, where art and culture have been deeply embedded, providing antidotes to non-participatory liberalism, myopic localism, authoritarian statehood, and the related ideas of art and curation.”