Between Machine and Mirage: Inside the Peruvian Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale
By Keshav AnandI can hear the Peruvian Pavilion before seeing it. Descending the stairs at Gwangju’s Yangnim Art Museum, there is a grinding, an almost animalistic sound, something between a creak and a moan, the kind of noise you associate with whales more than with ceramics.
I arrived in Gwangju a day earlier, after five days in Seoul in which Frieze, Kiaf and a seemingly endless sequence of openings had collapsed into one long blur. For a fortnight it feels like the international art world has transplanted itself to the peninsula, moving from fair to biennale to museum dinner with barely a pause. Gwangju offers a different rhythm to the capital. It’s hotter here, slower, and somehow more charged, its own history and tensions bubbling beneath the surface.
Titled You Must Change Your Life, inspired by the final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, the 16th Gwangju Biennale explores how new forms of life emerge through artistic practice. In Rilke’s 1908 poem, a fragment of an ancient sculpture releases within its viewer an overwhelming surge of emotional energy, culminating in the injunction: “You must change your life.” Yet the poem offers no prescription. Transformation remains open.
Stepping inside the Peruvian Pavilion, titled At the Threshold and curated by Silvana Lagos, the source of the creaking sound reveals itself. Luis Enrique Zela-Koort’s ceramic gears, resembling industrial transmission parts, turn against one another with a friction that is wearing them down. Around the sculptures, Alonso León-Velarde’s canvases hang: a large green landscape cut by red veins, appearing like a vast panel of included gemstone or a mossy terrain, a smaller grey painting, and, held in a concave, bowed frame that bends the wall itself, a work titled Después de la Visión de San Jerónimo.
Moving through the gallery, every perspective feels intentionally composed though Lagos tells me this composition is more instinctual than by design. “There was a funny moment during installation: looking at the placement drawings, the layout resembled a cog mechanism. It was not planned, but it was exactly right, a system where each element only turns because something else is turning against it.” That image stayed with me walking round the room. “You can absolutely have a singular encounter with any one piece, that mattered to me,” she says, “but from every angle one work is being countered by another.”
Discussing the connection between the two artists, she elaborates: “Neither of them is making work that is only about themselves. They are both reaching toward something larger, the sense that a person, or an object, is the sum of everything that has passed through it.” She reaches for the succinct phrasing of Édouard Glissant: “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.” Neither artist, she points out, treats Peru “as a source to be traced back to,” but rather “as something constituted through contact and ancestral knowledge.”
Zela-Koort’s gears are cast from stoneware, one of the oldest materials available to us, in the shape of one of industrial modernity’s most literal symbols. He describes the gear almost as a personality before it was an object. “It immediately implies transmission, efficiency, repetition and coordination, but it is also fundamentally relational: by itself it does almost nothing, and its function only emerges through contact with another body.” Removing it from its usual job, he says, is what makes the work possible at all. “That displacement opens it up as a speculative object.”
León-Velarde arrives at a sense of displacement from an entirely different direction, via the mirage. He grew up in Lima, a coastal desert city, travelling as a child to archaeological sites like Nazca and Pachacamac, and those landscapes still shape how he thinks about vision. “Both Fata Morganas in the ocean and phenomenological atmospheric mirages in the land serve as perfect metaphors for higher states of consciousness,” he tells me, before making a claim that is hard to shake off in front of the paintings. “In my mind, there’s no significant distinction between a nun experiencing religious ecstasy, a person having a psychotic episode, a shaman encountering gods or ancestors, or a dehydrated castaway believing there’s water through the mirage of an oasis. These states converge at the intersection of tapping into higher states of consciousness and parallel dimensions.”
Standing close enough to feel the gears’ vibrations through the floor, it becomes clear that Zela-Koort has little interest in his machines behaving well. “Sound is a very important part of how these works are experienced,” he says. “At times they become unexpectedly musical, almost ritualistic. At other moments those same sounds become deeply unsettling. You hear friction, impact, dragging and resistance, and become very conscious that these fragile ceramic bodies are being subjected to continuous mechanical stress.
Clay does not instinctively belong within this kind of mechanical system… but I insist on that incompatibility precisely because it provides a poetic and anti-essentialist way of reframing technology.” The firing temperatures, he explains, set terms for an uncertainty he wants to preserve rather than eliminate. “I can anticipate certain tendencies, such as which elements may erode sooner, which may resonate differently, or where fragility might accumulate, but I cannot determine precisely how or when something will break. That uncertainty is fundamental to the work.”
León-Velarde’s own relationship to the uncertain runs through his account of trompe-l’oeil, which he treats less as illusionism than as a kind of camouflage. “I perceive trompe-l’oeil as a material available to painters, a pictorial device that draws the viewer into the enchantment of painting… There is a strong connection between trompe-l’oeil and the idea of the ‘mirage’ in these works… There’s a lot of openness in the works exhibited in Gwangju. This uncertainty inherent to trompe-l’oeil heightens the experience of unity within these paintings. I think believing or having faith in something is to be in kinship with doubt, and therefore, in a way, being certain is to counter unity. If I were certain about everything I make, there would be no mystery. I think this is where poetry happens for me.”
The artist’s practice brings together Catholic iconography, huacas, the Nazca lines and the visual noise of the Lima street market. “This is similar to how one might find a T-shirt or a backpack in a market that has a mishmash of Western symbols and icons combined into a new image. This idea of the bootleg or the knockoff is syncretic to me and exists in various aspects of vernacular culture in Peru.” Even the concave frame around Después de la Visión de San Jerónimo, developed with the architect Isidoro Michán-Guindi, grew out of a practical problem, canvases rolled up and carried between Mexico City and Lima during the pandemic, which he later turned into a display device. “The work sits within a concave frame that bends and distorts the surrounding space, directing the viewer’s focus entirely toward the image. This optical effect enhances the sense of entry into a liminal realm.”
Both artists, in their distinct vocabularies, are describing a refusal to let their material behave predictably. Zela-Koort returns more than once to the idea that technology is never neutral. “Every technological solution already contains assumptions about what is valuable, what should be optimised, accelerated, measured, controlled, extracted or made productive. In that sense, the machine always carries a worldview inside it.” His sculptures, he says, are attempts to test that idea materially rather than illustrate it. “I often think of the sculptures as material essays. They do not illustrate an argument; they construct one through matter, through incompatibility, friction, sound, erosion, failure and transformation.”
The deterioration built into Zela-Koor’s sculptures is the part of the work he speaks about with the most feeling. “As the machines operate, friction, impact and vibration gradually alter the ceramic components, so the work that exists at the beginning of the exhibition is not exactly the same work that exists at the end.” He connects this to something personal. “As someone living with several chronic illnesses, transcendence has always seemed to me like a somewhat arrogant concept… I am much more interested in remaining inside material existence, in dependence, deterioration, adaptation and change.” He does not read the eventual breakage as failure. “I do not understand the erosion simply as destruction. It is evidence that a relationship has taken place.”
Lagos adds: “Korea has one of the deepest ceramic lineages in the world. Showing clay machinery here, ceramic behaving as an advanced technology rather than as heritage, meant the argument did not need to be made. The context made it.” She links the show to the city’s history. “Gwangju itself is a city whose biennale was founded in 1995 out of the memory of May 1980. It is a place where art is already understood as a site of civic memory, where deterioration and endurance are not abstractions. The works landed inside that.” Her own sense of the threshold, she tells me, is not theoretical. “I was born in Peru but have never lived there, and I did not travel there until I was twenty-one… the in-between space is not a theory for me, it is the condition I work from.”
By the time I leave, the sculptures I saw on arrival are not quite the ones in front of me now, with puddles of dust and clay fragments gathering at their bases. The exhibition travels next to MAM in Trujillo, the city where Emilio Rodríguez-Larraín’s original Máquina de Arcilla was built and eventually demolished, a loop Lagos “had not fully seen at the start.” Looking back at the room from the stairs, I thought of something else she said: “What I came away with is that both pieces function almost as self-portraits, and the artists might argue with me on that. But that is what makes them interesting: they are personal and simultaneously much wider. They speak at once about Peru now, about ancestral knowledge, and about the world at large.”
The 16th Gwangju Biennale runs from 5 September to 15 November 2026.
Feature image: AntiProduction I, II, One In All, Después de la Visión de San Jerónimo, 2026, installation view, 16th Gwangju Biennale © Alonso Leon-Velarde, Luis Enrique Zela-Koort. Photography by Hwang Inho