The Arts Council Korea (ARKO) has appointed Binna Choi to curate the Korean Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, with Goen Choi and Hyeree Ro as the country’s main representative artists.

Binna Choi is a Seoul-born curator with two decades of experience in the international art world. She recently served as co-curator of this year’s Hawaiʻi Triennial and led the Casco Art Institute in Utrecht from 2008 to 2023. After curating the Gwangju Biennale in 2016, she co-directed the 2022 Singapore Biennale. Her proposal envisions the pavilion as a living monument—conceived as a “fortress” and “nest”—that addresses how social division can transform into resilience, exploring the aftermath of South Korea’s 2024 political crisis and referencing the three-year period after Japanese occupation, which is widely known as Haebang konggan or “liberation space.” Drawing on this turbulent moment in Korean history, the pavilion will “consider its evolution, continuity, and transnational potential amid today’s geopolitics,” Choi said in a press release.

Goen Choi is a Seoul-based artist who creates site-specific sculptural installations using repurposed industrial materials to explore the boundaries between interior and exterior spaces. She was the winner of the Frieze Seoul Artist Award in 2024. Hyeree Ro, who works between New York and Seoul, develops installations and performances that incorporate defamiliarized objects and languages, taking inspiration from her personal experience as a constant migrant. In 2023, she received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant.

Under Binna Choi’s conceptual framework, both artists will engage with the architectural design and physical location of the Korea Pavilion within the Giardini as “sensual, intellectual, and social fields of action” that denote “continuous movement and imagination.” Moreover, the exhibition will serve as a space for interaction, hosting “additional voices” that expand on the project’s aim of fostering dialogue and connection. 

Yuqian Fan is an editorial intern at AAP.