The Busan Biennale committee this week announced Jacob Fabricius as the new artistic director for the next edition of the biennale. Fabricius, who is currently director at Kunsthal Aarhus outside Copenhagen, apparently impressed the committee with a proposal which displayed a ‘profound understanding’ of Busan’s history and identity. The committee also praised his ‘boundary-broadening concept actively applying literature and music’, which reflects the transdisciplinary approach to curating Fabricius has embraced during his years at Kunsthal Aarhus. The news of his appointment comes unusually late, with the next edition slated to open in September 2020. According to a press release, the biennale has been going through some internal soul-searching trying to redefine its goals and ambitions, as well as scouting for an alternative location to the Busan Museum of Art. What this new vision might be is not clear, but the requirement in the open call was for a candidate who’d be able to ‘raise new discourses in art of the times in an era of neoliberalism and the fourth industrial revolution’.
Before joining the Kunsthal Aarhus in 2015, Fabricius was associate curator at Cneai=, a contemporary art centre outside Paris. Earlier, he served as director and curator at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen and as director of the Malmö Konsthall in Sweden. He is the founder of the publishing company Pork Salad Press and a newspaper project called Old News, and is a board member of the Danish Arts Foundation.
1 August 2019
