Gwangju Biennale 2028 Drops the Curated Star Curator for an Open Call — and Asks Whether the Model Still Works

On 30 June 2026 the Gwangju Biennale Foundation confirmed what had been circulating in the Korean art press for weeks: the next edition of the Gwangju Biennale, scheduled for 2028, will select its artistic director through a public open call rather than the private invitation that has, for three decades, defined how the show is made. The change, modest on paper, touches one of the most-watched positions in the international exhibition circuit — a role past holders have used to organise surveys of postcolonial memory, the politics of representation, and the curatorial imagination itself.

The break matters less for who might apply than for what it concedes about the institution behind the show. For decades the Gwangju Biennale worked the way most major biennials work: a small committee, often working through the foundation's president, drew up a shortlist, sounded out a single candidate whose name would carry the catalogue and the press cycle, and unveiled them twelve to eighteen months before opening. The open call turns that choreography inside out. Anyone, anywhere, with a proposal can put themselves forward. The foundation says it is interested in "diverse perspectives" and in widening the pool beyond the same fifteen or twenty names that rotate through Basel, Berlin, São Paulo, Sydney and Sharjah.

The Gwangju Biennale has always occupied a specific place in that rotation. Founded in 1995, the eighth year after the May 1980 Gwangju Democratisation Movement in which hundreds of civilians were killed by the South Korean army, the biennale was conceived as a memorial and an argument — that contemporary art could carry a civic claim about democracy, memory and the price of dissent. The early editions, organised by figures including the late Okwui Enwezor, put Gwangju on the same map as Kassel and Venice and made its name inseparable from a kind of globally minded, historically serious curating. Later editions have continued that thread, with shows built around themes such as "Imagined Borders" and "Mild Temperament," and have moved through a roster of curators including Nicolas Bourriaud, Harald Szeemann and Massimiliano Gioni.

Why the format changed

The foundation's public reasoning is procedural and refreshingly unsentimental. Selection by private invitation, the argument goes, narrows the field to people already inside the institution's address book. Open calls, by contrast, surface proposals the committee would not otherwise see — particularly from curators working outside the Western and East Asian circuits that dominate the international calendar, and from practitioners earlier in their careers who cannot yet attract a private approach. The foundation has not published a deadline or a formal brief; what it has signalled is a willingness to be surprised.

The change also responds to a quieter pressure that has built up around the format over the last decade. The major biennials — Venice, documenta, São Paulo, Istanbul, Gwangju — have all weathered accusations that their star-curator model concentrates curatorial authorship in a small professional caste, that the thematic essays attached to each edition obscure rather than clarify what the shows are actually arguing, and that the entire apparatus now functions as much as a press event and a sponsorship vehicle as a public exhibition. Open calls do not, by themselves, fix any of that. But they do redistribute a small amount of power from the institution to the field.

A counter-reading

There is a more sceptical read, and it deserves airtime. Open calls are not, historically, how biennials of Gwangju's stature have produced their strongest editions. The shows most often cited as the biennale's high points — Enwezor's 1995 platform, the dense historical excavations of subsequent editions — were conceived by curators with long institutional biographies, large research budgets, and the standing to assemble difficult, slow work on a deadline. An open call can in principle surface that kind of figure; in practice the people most likely to apply are those with the time and professional flexibility to write a hundred-page proposal for free, which tends to skew the applicant pool toward tenured academics, mid-career curators with institutional support, and the kind of international operator who already circulates in the biennial network.

There is also the question of what the foundation gains. Private invitation is opaque; open call is legible. Should the 2028 edition disappoint, the foundation can plausibly argue that it ran a fair, transparent process and that the field simply did not produce a stronger proposal. That is a useful position for an institution that has, in recent years, faced criticism over budget scale and artistic direction. It is also, depending on one's taste, a slightly evasive one.

What this sits inside

The wider pattern is the slow unbundling of the curator-as-author. Across the international exhibition circuit, the prestige attached to a single named artistic director has been eroding for at least a decade, in part because that figure has become a publishing platform as much as a working curator, in part because the thematic essay that accompanies each edition has grown longer and more theoretical as the exhibitions themselves have grown more dispersed. The format survives because it still does the work sponsors and city governments want: a name on a poster, a press cycle, a catalogue, a run of openings that produces favourable coverage. Open calls gesture at something different. They imply that the show's authorship is provisional, contestable, and that the institution is prepared to be less sure in advance of what it is doing.

That gesture is easier to make in Gwangju than it would be in Venice, where the appointment of the next artistic director of the international art exhibition remains a matter of national-government signalling and where the candidates are negotiated years in advance. Gwangju is provincial in the literal sense — it is a regional city in a country whose capital hosts the better-funded, more commercially oriented fair circuit — and that provincialism has long been the source of its curatorial independence. The foundation can run an experiment that the bigger platforms cannot.

Stakes and what remains uncertain

For Korean curators and the broader East Asian exhibition scene, the practical stakes are concrete. An open call lowers the barrier to the most visible curatorial position in the country; it also exposes Korean mid-career curators to a process with no precedent in their domestic market. For the international circuit, the question is whether Gwangju's 2028 edition will be read, retrospectively, as a model or as a cautionary tale. If the chosen director produces a strong, distinct show, the format will travel. If the open call produces a committee-driven compromise — or, worse, a process so overloaded with applications that the foundation defaults to the most familiar names anyway — the experiment will be quietly retired and the invitation model restored at the next opportunity.

What the public materials do not yet specify is the size of the budget the next artistic director will work with, the formal structure of the open call, or whether the foundation intends to publish a longlist. Those details will determine whether the change is real. Until they are on the page, the gesture is the news.

Desk note: this article leads with the foundation's own announcement and frames the change as a procedural break inside an established institutional tradition, rather than as a rupture. Coverage in the Western art press has tended to treat the Gwangju Biennale primarily as a venue for postcolonial and memorial discourse; Monexus reads it here also as a working exhibition institution under ordinary pressures of budget, sponsorship and public legitimacy.