UBERMORGEN
Busan Biennale, South Korea
17 August – 20 October 2024
The 2024 edition of the Busan Biennale was co-curated by Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte. Mey, an art historian and independent curator based in London, is also a PhD candidate in South-East Asian art at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She was part of the founding team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, curating its residency program. Philippe Pirotte, an art historian, critic, and curator, is a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and Adjunct Senior Curator at the Museum and Pacific Film Archive of the University of California, Berkeley.
Following a research trip to Vienna in September 2023, they invited the Austrian-Swiss artist duo UBERMORGEN to participate in the Biennale with a new commission. Titled "The Silver Singularity," UBERMORGEN created an installation that plays with alternate timelines and explores the concept of "Happy Dystopias." The work begins at a key moment in history—the death of activist Carlo Giuliani during the G8 protests in Genoa in 2001—and imagines how this event caused a shift in reality. Their installation featured a mix of natural and artificial elements, including a forest and dark silver-ceramic imprints, combined with a spy thriller narrative and a secret website. This work was the last in their "Happy Dystopia" series (2020-2024) and set the stage for their next series, "Radical Universalism," starting in 2025.
Founded in 1995 in Vienna by lizvlx and Hans Bernhard, UBERMORGEN were part of the Net.Art avant-garde of the 1990s and early 2000s digital actionism. Their work, which spans installation, video art, and digital media, often employs scams as artistic performances to highlight the dangers of the digital world. For instance, during the 2000 U.S. Presidential elections, they created a website called "Vote Auctions," allowing US citizens to sell their votes to the highest bidder, which led to investigations by the NSA, FBI, and CIA. Past solo and group exhibitions include KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin; Les Abattoirs, Toulouse; Louvre, Paris; Seoul Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
This was the artists' first collaboration with Phileas.
