On February 21, Arts Council Korea announced the exhibition plan for the Korean Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 at the ARKO Art Center. The Korean Pavilion will be curated by Seolhui Lee (Chief Curator, Kunsthal Aarhus) and Jacob Fabricius (Director, Art Hub Copenhagen), who were selected in March last year, and will be represented by artist KOO JEONG A.

The Korean Pavilion exhibition, “KOO JEONG A – ODORAMA CITIES,” began with an open call for anyone to participate. KOO and the exhibition team distributed questionnaires through online and offline channels to collect individuals’ ‘fragrant memories of Korean cities and hometowns.’ The Open Call, which began on June 25, 2023, and ran for about three months until September 30, 2023, was sent to various institutions and organizations, including the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Korean embassies abroad, Korean adoptees and communities, Korean Americans around the world, Korean schools and Korean American associations, people born in North Korea and living in South Korea, North Korean defectors and foundations that support them, foreigners who have visited North Korea, and the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Seoul.

Based on the ‘scent memories’ collected from people around the world, the exhibition team is in the process of translating the scents of Korea into a ‘visual imagination’ that is currently under development. The sculpture functions as a diffuser to spread the scent, an infinity symbol carved into the exhibition floor, and two wooden installations in the form of Mobius’s sashes that run through the Korean Pavilion, whose mutating theme also serves as an echo of KOO JEONG A’s ‘OUSSS’, a concept of infinite transformation created by the artist in the 1990s. OUSSS, a concept of infinite transformation coined by the artist in the 1990s, suggests “another extension of sensory experience” beyond the realm of the material and immaterial, to a place without clear boundaries.

‘Odorama’ is a word that combines ‘Odor’, meaning fragrance, and ‘rama’, meaning drama. Through this synaesthetic medium of smell and sight, KOO continues her practice of reconciling the invisible and the visible, and suggesting open possibilities beyond the boundaries. She focuses on encounters and coincidences through scent, and uses the energy connection between the space and the viewer as a motif.

In this sense, “KOO JEONG A – ODORAMA CITIES” can be seen as a continuation of the overall theme of the exhibition, “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere,” curated by Adriano Pedrosa, which focuses on nationality and belonging, and highlights people living across borders and boundaries. The scattering and dispersing nature of scent, which knows no boundaries, reminds us of the presence of foreigners wherever we go and wherever we are, as well as the presence of the public who freely participated in the open call.

The nearly 600 stories collected through the Scent Memories Open Call will be made public on the Korean Pavilion website (www.korean-pavilion.or.kr) on April 17, the first day of the preview, and the names of all participants in the Open Call will be published in the exhibition catalog of the 2024 Korean Pavilion.

The 2024 Venice Biennale will be held from April 20 to November 24 (preview: April 17-19) at the Giardini and Arsenale exhibition centers in Venice for about seven months, and the Korean Pavilion will hold an official opening ceremony on April 17.

References

• 한국문화예술위원회(Arts Council Korea)
  
• 베니스비엔날레 한국관(Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion)