Gwangju 2008 poster

Gwangju 2008 poster

The Gwangju Biennale, Asia’s first biennial of contemporary art, was launched in 1995 in Gwangju, South Korea. This year, the seventh installment, titled Annual Report: A Year in Exhbitions, presents artwork from exhibitions initiated between January 2007 and September 2008, by artists including Taryn Simon, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Conner, and filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The 2008 Gwangju Biennale has been curated under the artistic direction of Okwui Enwezor to have three prongs: “On the Road” highlights traveling exhibitions; “Position Papers” focuses on curatorial innovations; and “Insertions” brings works created especially for the biennale. In addition to the city’s Biennale Hall, the exhibitions this year are staged at five locations throughout the larger Gwangju metropolitan area, including the mountain home of Korean traditional painter Uijae, and a cinema to present the work of Fassbinder.

We were approached to work on the project by the creative director of Gwangju Biennale 2008, Okwui Enwezor, with whom we’d worked on the 2007 Seville Biennial (BIACS2) and the identity for San Francisco Art Institute.

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Uijae Museum, one of five sites included in Gwangju 2008
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Gwangju Biennale Hall 2008, in preparation for the September opening

We designed the identity for Annual Report, focusing the biennale’s theme of “between.” Just as the biennale does not have a single theme, our identity concept is based on bringing together all kinds of content, with the time period as criteria. Using a graphic “07” and “08” as bookends, the identity flexes to feature anything from imagery to text of any length. In this way, the content becomes part of the identity itself. Our work for the biennale includes the catalog, visitor guidebook, magazine ads, press releases, signage, and a visitor map of the exhibition locations in the city. For practical reasons, we’ve been collaborating with Korean printers and the team at the foundation.

Annual Report: A Year in Exhbitions opens September 5.