By Camilla Boemio

The ‘Stateless Mind Pavilion’, at 16th Gwangju Biennale, brings together artists from Asia, Africa, Europe and South and North America, whose practices engage questions of movement, memory, identity, sound, ecology, technology, and collective knowledge. Rather than representing a nation, the Pavilion proposes another way of imagining international exchange—one grounded in relationships rather than borders.

Instead of functioning as a fixed exhibition, the Pavilion unfolds as a constellation of temporary relay points connecting artists, communities, and places. Each relay becomes both a local gathering and part of a wider translocal conversation, where encounters, hospitality, collaboration, and shared experiences take precedence over national representation.

Through installations, moving image, sound, performance, workshops, artist talks, neighbourhood walks, shared meals, radio broadcasts, and informal gatherings, the Pavilion explores how artistic practice can create spaces for dialogue across different histories, cultures, and geographies. Sound functions as one of the connecting threads—not as a prescribed medium, but as an invitation to listen to places, to one another, and to the conditions from which each encounter emerges.

Resonating with the 16th Gwangju Biennale’s theme, ‘You Must Change Your Life’, the ‘Stateless Mind Pavilion’ remains unfinished, adaptive, and shaped by those who participate in it. Rather than presenting a single narrative, it offers an evolving ecology of encounters in which each local gesture contributes to a larger conversation while retaining its own specificity.

The curator speaks to Miguel EdKe Keerveld about the inspiration and research behind his group show ‘Stateless Mind Pavilion’.

Originally you trained as a civil engineer, you transitioned into conceptual art to investigate the intersections of community, sustainability, and cultural memory. You are also the founder of Alakondre: A Space in Time. Can you introduce your artistic research? Tell me also about the concept of Alakondre.

Yeah, my formal education is in Infrastructure (high school and college), specialized in Civil Engineering, I worked in this area of experience as manager/consultant who has specialized in structural quality and safety improvement for construction and engineering firms, which I did for a decade. However, I have always been artist with my first exhibition way back in time: 2004 (National Art Fair, Suriname). 

In 2016, when I registered my Design Efficiency Art & Management [DEAM Advisory) bureau as sleeping firm, I wanted to explore the America’s (mainly Latin America) as a space of “the future” because my guts convinced me so, or rather my artistic mind? Following a scholarship from the Hartford University for their nomad9 MFA program, I was rejected a life insurance for a guarantee to enter US as student (because I am living with HIV); therefore, I could not participate in their low residency structured program taking place on several sites in the (North) America, departing from the US. Then, I decided going for backpacking combined with a set of Artist Residencies as an attempt to design my own MFA trajectory. A lived experience that informed my research. 

When I returned home in Suriname, I started a course for social worker in Counselling and Coaching, to dive explore/understand Empathy and Empire’s problematic power structures, more based on an artistic approach. As a gay man, in my teenage year’s art was my tool to deal with the fear for responses of my intimate community’s morality (their belief informed in Christianity), fearing the unknow that would reveal after they’d figured out my sexuality. This is why I see art more cosmology, rather than an esthetic practice. Not even sure if I am against beauty. Art supported me in dealing with the consequences of Coloniality. At this point, practicing art brought me into the inquiry I have been engaging in for a decade now. It is informed by what I think of as her performative philosophy: Alida Neslo’s societal experiment in the context of Suriname. She returned home after an international career as performer, educator, and scholar that has triggered a wave which I joined through experimentations in applied analysis and art production: “Alakondre: A Space in Time” in collaboration with Readytex Art Gallery in Paramaribo (Suriname), the largest private gallery in the Caribbean. 

ALAKONDRE [a.la.kôn.drè] is a Sranan term. Sranan being the lingua-franca in Suriname and a Creole language made up of 22 local languages. In literal and political translation, it simultaneously refers to “all nations/people” and none, or all colors, for example. Generally, this concept is overarching, plural, performative, and inclusive; a cosmological concept informed in West African heritage in Suriname (and influenced by Native American and European traditions) referring to different domains of existence that includes spirits of the land, spirits of the air, spirits of the water, and spirits of the forest. While alakondre is a mechanism of different origins, in my inquiry it engages many histories that are, at the same time, in several positions. That is way I aim at exploring this concept (an opponent of apartheid) as an unfolding beyond the colonial structures of power.

For Joan Jonas the body is the vehicle; Is It also for you in which way?

Empire has colonized the body, to my understanding, or to how I was educated in dialogue with and support by mentors such as Independent Researcher, Curator, and Artist Francisco Guevara who I have met in Mexico. Even though I don’t reject body, as none of us can exist out of Coloniality and Empire, I aim for a beyond body focus through the mechanism of play. Because play is rooted in relation, it creates space, while body, to me feels like territory, place and a death object, the tools Empire can use to control. Play, on the contrary, is rooted in space and in time, it has not (yet) been colonized and is alive/active; why I have convinced myself, through play as beyond body focus, as accessing agency: a generative structure rooted in strength to challenge structures of Empire and of Empathy rooted in power.

This is no rejection to body; that would be acting in place and history, coloniality. Rejecting the body wouldn’t be an activation of alakondre. Myartwork’s statement (for the Gwangju Biennale) specifically highlights ‘body’; mainly staging the work (and its labor) as an engagement with ‘body’; it identifies the body as ‘Casa de los Muertos’.

Can you introduce your participation to Stateless Mind Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale?

For the Stateless Mind Pavilion, my installation “Zócalo: We Refugees” was selected. In this installation, the final part of a trilogue with the installations “Alakondre Blue” and “Butterfly Currency” as architecture of belonging, I chose to include the title of Hannah Arendt’s 1943 essay “We Refugees” entangled with the original title I gave this artwork because her essay was written when she was stateless after fleeing Nazi Europe and because Arendt understood refugee as symptomatic subject of modernity: one without the right to have rights, who carries home as internal wound rather than a geographic coordinate.

Here, “zócalo” or plinth is used radically, neither the monumental plaza of state power, nor the base that holds colonial statues; but as a communal gut, a stateless grounding, diasporic and ancestral gathering aiming to reactivate what history has obscured. Staged as space beyond history and nation-state, this work comprises 110 pieces on paper seeking a site of strength: space of “in-between belonging,” citing Arendt; what Stateless Mind Pavilion aims at as nation-state has failed. From the idea of pure origin, “zócalo” is “refugee” as in statelessness as condition of possible for new togetherness. More than a retrospective, the installation celebrates labor; the past is not archived here but set in motion through 333 sheets from eleven diaries that documented times experienced throughout Aruba, Brazil, Chile, Curaçao, Mexico, New York, and Suriname between 2023 and 2024). This labor suggests an organ of digestion or ‘communal gut’. Blue (a color mostly associated with power) reminds of the ocean, referencing to the Middle Passage, and a sky as fluid, ungovernable space. Both the ocean and sky exist between cultures and continents. 

Which is the lasting impact of art? 

Based on my own experience in using art, I would say finding strength, gaining confidence and building relations, amongst many more consciousness- and health-related impacts, why I first acknowledge its societal capacity in either individual or communal setting. When I say, “my own experience,” this includes the many curatorial experiments and artistic interventions that I have been involved with; for example, seeing less advantage youth and professional artists build confidence, bloom, and gain strength in settings where art production provided space and time for emotional analysis, therapy and self-reflection. Whether these applications were in a personal or professional setting of individuals or more collectively and societally charged. I think art aligned with psychoanalysis creates a lasting impact for all.

How can art extend social justice?

I don’t know if art (alone) can extend social justice. But through multi-interdisciplinary praxes, experience, and knowledge, art becomes a tool (whether socio-politically, spiritually, ecologically, or pedagogically) to support the production of cultural, ecological, political knowledge, amongst other, which surely leads into a safer and mor just world. I have seen people and societies develop and gain knowledge, just from their engagement with art’s temporality and its spatiality. That’s why I keep documenting that which I can know and experience as gaining from art, to share in the world; especially the socio-ecological and geo-political climates we are all thrown into. 

Stateless Mind Pavilion. 16th Gwangju Biennale Pavilion

Neither Here nor There, but Everywhere

Curated by Amir Zainorin, Dalida Maria Benfield and Chris Bratton / CAD+SR, Fadly Sabran, Anna Cuomo, Camilla Boemio

05/09/2026 – 15/11/2026

Seeum, Gwangju

Miguel EdKe Keerveld (b. 1982, Paramaribo, Suriname; based in São Paulo, Brazil) is an artist and researcher whose practice bridges artistic research and social engagement. Drawing on Caribbean and Latin American perspectives, his work explores decolonisation, collective care, identity, and inclusive forms of knowledge production. Working across installation, participatory projects, and curatorial initiatives, he creates platforms for dialogue and social transformation. Originally trained as a civil engineer, Keerveld transitioned into conceptual art to investigate the intersections of community, sustainability, and cultural memory. He is the founder of Alakondre: A Space in Time and has received awards including the Silvia de Groot Fund (2021), the CATAPULT SHAR Artist Residency Award (2020), and the U.S. Department of State Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund (2017)