Birke Gorm: the evening and the morning and the night
16th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea
5 September – 15 November 2026
Artist Birke Gorm is representing Austria at the 16th Gwangju Biennale in 2026. Under the title the evening and the morning and the night, she has transformed the upper floor of Gwangju's Eunam Museum of Art, both physically and conceptually, into an attic—a storage place, full of latent energies, largely left undisturbed. The exhibition is curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini and marks the second national presentation by Austria at the Gwangju Biennale.
In her artistic practice, Birke Gorm investigates the life cycle of everyday objects. Through carefully collecting, reusing, and reinterpreting materials, she examines how objects carry, lose, or acquire meaning. In doing so, she interrogates the ideological frameworks that shape how history is narrated and considers how understandings of gender, society, industrialisation, and value change over time.
The attic functions as a central motif of this year's Austrian Pavilion. A tent-like structure of layered fabric creates a landscape of uneven spaces, low ceilings, and hidden corners. Made from repurposed textiles varying in weight and texture, the tent envelops visitors in an immersive environment resembling a place where old, forgotten, or hidden objects are stored, where things appear static, fixed, or asleep, yet reveal a life of their own when unobserved. Regarded as the mind of the house, the attic mirrors its residents' emotional states, symbolizing the mind's storage and rediscovery of repressed memories, unprocessed emotions, and the societal forces that linger beneath the surface and shape identity. In this realm of the hidden, the often-overlooked stories—especially those of women, who are frequently marginalized—are brought to the foreground as sources of resistance and resilience.
Through an ever-changing lighting choreography and a subtle soundscape of synthetic and everyday sounds, composed by musician Christian Ingemann, the installation shifts the space between day and night. In doing so, it creates a theatrical atmosphere that examines how standardized working hours and the separation of industrial production from domestic life have shaped the organization of labor, its economic value and its gendered divisions. It also places creativity and imagination within recurring rhythms of work and rest, productivity and exhaustion. Within this dynamic, the attic no longer appears as a static storage space, but as a living, continuously transforming environment.
