Reviews
How will Flow Festival respond to criticisms about its relationships with its free workforce, security contractors, Helsinki Police and its Zionist holding company? Will it align with or distance itself from the actions and affiliations of its financial backers?
READFlow Festival: A Retrospective
Billion-euro changes in Flow Festival’s ownership signal a strong intent to continue commercializing. The Flow Festival, the locals once cherished, has been hollowed out by business interests and now emits the stench of globalist capital.
The experiences narrated in the exhibition seek to reshape these power dynamics and effect a decolonization from a Western anthropological gaze that is as exhausting and draining as any other toxic work environment. But is this comparison even adequate given that the Qworkaholics’ relationship with the outside world is suffused with oppression and social mistreatment at the most basic (desire, instinct, sensibility) level? How can these relationships be reshaped if burnout is at the very core of one’s existence, not just a part of it?
READAnarchitecture of Desire: A Review of Resonance Beyond Escape – Qworkaholics Anonymous III
Qworkaholics are victims of various colonial systems of power whose “primary occupation” is the struggle for survival in the present-day world, which systematically is “othering” them, subjecting their bodies, identities and affects to daily violence and oppression. Can the mundane drudgery of Western consumer culture that is oppressive and exploitative as the colonial systems be challenged through visual and physical forms that reflect the actual choreography of living and sensing?
Bulgaria as a space and a nation had a profound impact on the way I embody myself and shaped and reshaped my sense of national identity. To this day, I remember sitting on my grandmother’s lap in 2006 on New Year’s Eve in my house, awaiting the beginning of the new chapter in Bulgarian history—our ascension to the European Union. For a country that was not a direct participant in the colonial project of Western Europe and so often described as a part of the “margins” of Europe, this geography, which I was living in, would finally be put on the world map. Or so I believed.
READBulgarian Pavillion’s ‘The Neighbours’: Bridging the Memory Archipelago of the Bulgarian Communist Past
This is not a review of the Bulgarian pavilion but a challenge to deal with history’s silences, recognize my family’s past, and find the connections and bridges between my two bodies. One seeing and one actively articulating my positionality in the world in relation to the notion of nationhood, identity and language, which I was prescribed — Bulgarian Turkish.
The main exhibition, “an operatic exhibition about the space we live in”, is housed in the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall. Its galleries present significant challenges due to their modular white walls and vast areas to fill. This is likely why the main exhibition includes works by 72 artists from 30 countries. The 15th Gwangju Biennale is not the only large-scale exhibition to challenge the concept of a “static exhibition,” but it stands out for its innovative approach. The main exhibition shifts focus from the dominant sense of sight to other senses, particularly listening, based on the visitors’ mobility. Constructed as “a narrative,” the venues connect musical and visual forms.
READListening to the World: A Geopolitical Lens on the Gwangju Biennale
The 15th Gwangju Biennale, marking its 30th anniversary, focuses on sound and ecological themes. Rooted in South Korea’s democracy movement and the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, does the Biennale continue to uphold its founding declaration of a “living memorial” or sidestep the political?
Toxic mirrors the spirits of a society learning to navigate freedom while haunted by an unresolved past. Here, the idea of the West glimmers like a distant oasis—a place of glossy dreams and bright promises that never quite materialise, as for many, those dreams soon meet harsh reality.
READA Dance of Intimacy, Ambition and Despair: A Review of Saulė Bliuvaitė’s Toxic
In Saulė Bliuvaitė’s film ‘Toxic’, friendship and rivalry weave together in a complex dance, an intricate play of support and silent competition. Filled with both violence and tender moments, in the film it emerges as a fragile lifeline.
