[dropcap style=”font-size:100px;color:#992211;”]S[/dropcap]outh Korea’s best-selling boyband, BTS, has launched a series of five major public art projects across the globe involving collaborations between some of the world’s most significant artists and curators.
CONNECT, BTS will take place across five cities, with each project free to the public. The first in the series, an immersive audiovisual work by Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, opened today at London’s Serpentine Galleries. Catharsis (until 15 March 2020) shows a digital simulation of a re-imagined ancient forest and can be experienced at the Serpentine or via a dedicated website.
Other projects in the series include Fly with Aerocene Pacha (21 January – 22 March 2020) by Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno, which will attempt to break several world records for the first fully solar, ‘human-free’ flight. The work will launch in Salinas Grandes, Argentina’s great salt lake, with the resulting film of the work to be shown in Buenos Aires until 22 March.
British artist Antony Gormley will create a vast “drawing in space” at New York’s Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 3. New York Clearing (2020) will consist of “a single line made up of 18km of square aluminium tubing that loops and coils without beginning or end”. It will be on show from 4 February to 27 March.
Two further projects will also take place. The first involves two separate shows at Seoul’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) by British artist Ann Veronica Janssens and Korean artist Yiyun Kang. The second is a group performance by 17 artists at Gropius Bau in Berlin. Visitors to each of the shows can access special introductory videos recorded by the band talking about the individual artworks.
CONNECT, BTS has been led by Daehyung Lee, who currently serves as BTS’s artistic director. Lee, an independent Korean curator, organised his country’s pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale.
As the art world continues to devise new ways to appeal to broader audiences, this partnership opens up novel, potentially lucrative avenues for cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Source: The Art Newspaper
Naila Scargill is the publisher and editor of horror journal Exquisite Terror. Holding a broad editorial background, she has worked with an eclectic variety of content, ranging from film and the counterculture, to political news and finance.
