4 November 2026
Critical Curatorial Goongly
feminist art festival
4-7 November
opening hours:
Wednesday – Saturday, 14:00 – 21:00
The project title *Goongly* (궁리/窮理) derives from two characters: *goong* (궁/窮), which originates from an ideogram representing a body stuck inside a narrow cave, and “ly” (리/理), from an indeogram representing polishing jade. Together, *Goongly* means to think deeply about the essence and underlying principles of things. The Critical Curatorial Goongly seeks to move beyond the old binary of Europe and the rest of the world, thinking together about a new internationalism grounded in feminist solidarity examining the feminist potential of the production and presentation of art.
This is not a discourse of sameness based on shared or normative womanhood, but rather a support for multiple voices speaking together, carefully encountering differences in the slow work of cultivating relationships which can support longer-term struggle. Building diference in each participant's own background, the project experiments with the possible range of transnational solidarity within art production and presentation. Our objective is not merely to discuss feminism or how to present feminist art, rather we wish to explore and discuss methodologies for activations in the arts which are themselves feminist. At the Goongly, feminism is not a message, it is a method.
Our first version of the "Critical Curatorial Goongly" at BAK Basecamp grounds our discussion with an intensive case study on the experience of feminist artists from South Korea. Four Europe-based artists (Yunjoo Kwak, Young Joo Lee, Go-Eun Im, ha cha youn) and four Korea-based artists/team (Hyunju Kim+Gwanghee Jo, Youngjoo Cho, Chang Jia, Hong Lee Hyunsook) meet at Basecamp in the Netherlands alongside radical European curators, theorists and others to engage, listen and support each other. Co-programmed with Basecamp, in co-ordination with local social action groups within and without the sphere of art, various live events, performances, concerts, lectures and more are planned to take place with local audiences during the festival period.
We will meet European feminist critics and curators who have long researched the structural limitations of contemporary art institutions and the exhibition form in Europe, whose histories were shaped by bourgeois liberal political structures, patriarchy, colonialism and imperialism. Together we will explore critical understandings of "artistic autonomy" and "artistic freedom" as concepts granted only to a minority, and examine how contemporary art institutions operating within dominant ideology have concealed or absorbed the radical potential that art might carry. We will discuss fundamental questions about post-Western or non-Western modes through which artists and curators might help foster radical social transformation.
The invited artists have been developing their own artistic practices and research in different spaces over many years, engaging with these structural limitations. ha cha youn, who emigrated first to Germany in 1983 and later settled in France, has produced work that assigns herself the identity of minority, foreigner, outsider, critically examining the underside of Western European welfare society. Yunjoo Kwak, based in the Netherlands, is conducting research into the history of three hundred years of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia. Youngjoo Cho has developed an artistic practice that poses questions about patriarchal structures in Korean society through her own experience of motherhood.
From *Goongly* to “”Joly”
Life goes on. Children and the elderly require care; social reproduction must go on, and this depends decisively on care labor overwhelmingly carried out by women. Artists have played a central role since the beginning of feminist movements. Yet radical feminist art does not sit comfortably within the agenda of contemporary art institutions. Demanding political "equality" and fundamentally questioning how social reproduction should be organized are entirely different matters. As Angela Dimitrakaki observes in her latest book, “Capitalism, Feminism, Art,”the more politically radical the valency of the art, the less it seems to conform to the conventions of contemporary art, in which so-called sovereign objects are displayed in an aseptic space abstracted from the outside world and the forces that reproduce it.
Feminist art and feminist curating must not only compete for support from existing institutions, they must instrumentalize those institutions for purposes other than their original intent, and habituate audiences to new forms of artistic participation, they must simultaneously begin to foster new institutionalities which produce radically different conditions for artists and audiences also on the margins or even outside the conventional definitions of artistic practice.
Oriented and drawn towards the art practices of our invited artists, we are compelled to articulate commonalities which can help us overcome our differences and cultivate and nurture longer-term alliances and associations towards shared feminist objectives. From our Goong-ly (궁리/窮理) meetings we set out to develop “Jo-ly” (조리/造理) methodology, active engaged pedagogy, and learning from practice, testing out what contemporary art practice and arts institutions can do to support the improvement of the conditions of women both here and around the world.
Artists: Youngjoo Cho, ha cha youn, Hong Lee Hyunsook, Go-Eun Im, Chang Jia, Hyunjoo Kim + Kwanghee Cho, Yunjoo Kwak, Youngjoo Lee
with:Igor Sevcuk, Agnès Prévost, Daru Jung, Hooi-Ying, Celestína Minichová
Directors: Ji Yoon Yang & Baruch Gottlieb
Coordinator: Alejandro Navarrete Cortés
Project Managers: Eunseo Kim & Minsun Kim
General Assistance: Celestína Minichová
Organized by: Sound Art Korea
Sponsored by: Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange (KOFICE)
For more information please contact: gallery.loop.seoul@gmail.com
Who should join the Goongly?
Any feminist person or group who wants to network and learn together.
Ecofeminists and others contending with with the patriarchal and colonial legacies of modernity.
Scholars who wish to work across disciplines and with diverse groups putting theory into practice
Feminist artists and curators who wish to explore how spaces of contemporary art can help support feminist aims internationally.
