Installation view of Shin Min’s work © Changwon Sulpture Biennale

Taking its title, silent apple, from a line in “A Well-Ripened Apple” a poem by acclaimed poet Kim Hyesoon, the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale brings sculptures down closer to the ground, on a horizontal plane. This newfound horizontality moves freely between existing systems, offering a new mode of seeing the world around us even as it invites questions around the relationship between sculpture and language, labor and industry, local and regional.

Skel, the etymological root of “sculpture,” means to carve or engrave, and shares valence with the act of “writing.” And it is the spirit of “writing,” in turn, that documents and preserves any city, summoning the countless beings who have lived in it through time. With a spirit of excavation and attitude of connection, silent apple proposes to rewrite the language of sculpture that has been accumulated for the strata of times.

silent apple draws on four distinct spaces discovered across this modern Korean planned city, deploying each as both big apple and grand exhibition map to scaffold the sculptural time of the contemporary artist. Indeed, even the spaces sandwiched between these exhibition halls offer a new sense and spirit of materiality, having also been engulfed in the sculptural time of each of the 63 participating teams (86 artists) as they stack, move, and dismantle their works. Taking the constellations of movement traced by visitors as they travel along various distinct pathways, the exhibition turns them into “vantage points” for viewing the sculptures at hand.

The horizontal routes that run through the interior and exterior of the Seongsan Art Hall building, the night hours of the sculptures showcased in Changwon Cultural Complex Dongnam Ground, the pillars of the exhibition space at Seongsan Mound, the intersection of sculpture and hillside and Korea’s modern industrial landscape all draw us, the audience, into the rushing flow of sculptural time. In addition to this external backdrop, audibility and movement also operate on another axis of silent apple. The sounds of this place, surrounding the sculptures, seep through here and there, moving us to listen close, leaning in to try and catch the quiet, unfamiliar reverberations about each piece.

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