Under the title 'Annual Report', the 7th Gwangju Biennale assembles the diverse activities and practices of contemporary art without any particular theme. It comprises a series of selected traveling exhibitions invited to use the biennale as a destination, a stop on the touring itinerary in the global exhibition network. By inviting exhibitions to the biennale, the aim is not simply to make an exhibition about exhibitions or to debate the principles of curatorial culture. Rather, exhibitions are understood here as fundamental expressions of cultural and intellectual practice, and as such have gone beyond being understood as a form of reflection or forum of debate for art.

The Biennale is designed around three components, 'On the Road', 'Position Papers', and 'Insertions'.  'On the Road' is a report on recent exhibitions that have occurred or exhibited elsewhere between 2007-2008. 'Position Papers' is a platform dedicated to the curatorial proposals and experiments in exhibition making by emerging curators. 'Insertions' takes on the format of a limited series of new projects commissioned specifically for the biennale. As said by Hyunjin Kim, 'Through this composition, we pursue the continuous diversification and the new potentiality of the key elements of contemporary art - exhibition, curator, artist, artwork. Also, by breaking away from a particular exhibition theme, we avoid homogeneity in the search for, a stratified discourse and distinctive, complicated, heterogeneous, and layered aesthetic languages and attitudes.'

The present catalogue includes essays by the Artistic Director of the Biennale Okwui Enwezor, Co-Curators Hyunjin Kim and Ranjit Hoskote, and Position Papers Curators Patrick D. Flores, Kim Jangun, Abdellah Karroum, Park Sunghyen and Claire Tancons.