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Exile Cityapproaches exile not as loss alone, but as an ongoing process of becoming, a condition in which identity, memory and belonging are constantly renegotiated across movement, distance and life elsewhere. Exile is therefore not only a state of displacement, but a mode of relation through which meetings across places can develop into friendship, collaboration, solidarity and long-term support.
As part of this proposition, AllArtNow’s Abir Boukhari — curator of Exile City and founder and director of AllArtNow — has invited VIDEOFORMES, a French organisation dedicated to video, hybrid and digital arts, to contribute to the Gwangju Biennial pavilion finissage. During his curatorial residency in South Korea, its Artistic Director Gabriel Soucheyre has been asked to curate a special program of video and digital arts for the occasion.
The program brings the work of video artists connected to VIDEOFORMES into the pavilion’s discursive and visual field, introducing artists and practices presented through the festival via works that engage displacement, digital subjectivity and the poetics of in-betweenness.
The finissage thus operates not simply as a conclusion but as a continuation of Exile City as a temporary city constituted through exchange, where belonging is produced through relations rather than territory.
Sous la peau de la Palestine – Zohra Hassani – 2025 – 4mn49
The artist removes layers of socks. Each fall releases a name. Sound accumulation builds collective memory. The earth receives, witnesses. Seen from above, the socks draw Palestine—territory made of embodied memories.
INcoming – Enrique Ramirez – 2017 – 17mn44
We all come into this world the same way, with nothing. When we must move or change environment for reasons beyond our control, when we are forced to flee, we often leave with nothing … to find a place where we can finally think of a new land, to rest our feet and to reach a sense of belonging.
This project was born out of a response to the infamous image published April 19, 2016, in which the Norwegian immigration minister, Sylvi Listhaug, was photographed in the Mediterranean Sea ‘abandoning ship’ from a Norwegian rescue vessel – wearing a protective orange survival suit – stating to the press: “You can’t put yourself in the same situation as the refugees but you can see it from that perspective [and experience] how it is to be in the water that way.”
As a symbolic response to this image, the artist invited foreigners living in Stavanger to partake in the same action and launch themselves into the North Sea in Stavanger – the capital of oil and economy in Norway – to simply jump into the water…and float.
The film is an allegory to the gesture of ‘throwing oneself into something’, but to throw oneself into something is not only a physical act but also a decision with deep layers and meanings. To throw oneself into the void, to jump into the water; to throw oneself into situations in life or into the unknown. Life is always a limbo where one must take that kind of decision, either to stay watching from the fringes or decide to throw ourselves in, and invent wonderful machines to help us survive the journey that is to jump …
In Vitro, Larissa Sansour/Søren Lind – 2019 – 28mn00
In Vitro is set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above.
BIENNALE DE GWANGJU 2026
Pavillon Allartnow – Exile City
Finissage: November 11, 2026
VIDEOFORMES present:
EXILE
Sous la peau de la Palestine – Zohra Hassani
INcoming – Enrique Ramirez
In Vitro, Larissa Sansour/Søren Lind
Curated by Gabriel V. Soucheyre / VIDEOFORMES for the Finissage event on the invitation of Abir Boukhari / Allartnow