Busan Biennale 2024: What Can Pirate Utopias Tell Us about the Future?
2024
This year’s Busan Biennale, inspired by David Graeber’s notion of ‘pirate enlightenment’, offers a glimpse into a world where progress can only be found outside the West
in Busan, South Korea
Curated by Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte, ‘Seeing in the Dark’ draws inspiration from David Graeber’s posthumously published work Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (2022), which posits that ideas of democracy and enlightenment originated from self-governing pirate communities in 18th-century Madagascar. Indeed, Graeber’s influence looms large over the exhibition. At HANSUNG1918 cultural centre, 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 the Church of Stop Shopping) and Graeber (Jamie Kelsey-Fry from Global Assembly and Extinction Rebellion). They ruminate on notions of property and the social contract: a playful display reinforcing the idea that concepts emerge from dialogue rather than individual thinking.
*) Nika Dubrovsky, Fight Club, 2022, 3-channel video. 