2026 Busan Biennale 'Dissident Chorus' turns its attention to sound amid an overexposure to the visual

The 2026 Busan Biennale will open under the title “Dissident Chorus” on Aug. 29, with 44 artists and teams from 23 countries spread across three venues on two of the city’s islands.

The Busan Biennale this year is conceived as a “polyphonic score” in three movements, according to the organizers. The first will call the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art on Eulsuk Island its home, with the museum to display works on ecology, care and regeneration, anchored to the island’s status as a protected bird habitat.  

Space One-Z, a former ship-equipment warehouse on Yeongdo Island’s waterfront, will host the second movement focusing on labor, the sea and diasporic memory.

The third movement will unfold inside the former Busan Nam High School — vacant since early this year — which the curators are treating as a rehearsal space for questions about pedagogy and collective knowledge. 

“This biennale, for us, is a score that unfolds over three movements,” explained Amal Khalaf, the co-director of this year’s biennale, during a press conference for the event at the Seoul Press Center in Jung District, central Seoul, on Wednesday. “Busan, as a city, for anybody who has spent time there, feels both very haunted and very alive.”

The roster for the Busan Biennale leans heavily toward artists working in sound, performance, choreography and club culture — a deliberate departure from the object-centered viewing experience of past editions.  

Joshua Serafin, the Brussels-based Filipino choreographer whose work appeared at the 2024 Venice Biennale, will premiere a new piece co-commissioned by the Centre Pompidou. Natasha Tontey, from Indonesia, will present a video work that weaves together a Minahasan ritual, Cold War-era insurgency and the figure of the woman warrior.  

Eric Baudelaire, also fresh off Venice, will contribute a piece built around students reconfiguring touch, listening and narration. 

Busan-based sculptor Park Hyun-sung, Suki Seo-kyeong Kang and Lim Min-ouk are among this year’s Korean participants.

Evelyn Simons, who serves as co-director with Khalaf, described the curatorial choice plainly.  

“This is a biennale that will go beyond the idea of the art object and rather look into art as a way of gathering and experiencing together,” she said during the press conference.  

Nightlife and clubbing, Simons added, are running threads: “The context of nightlife and of clubbing is of big importance to us as a source of inspiration.”

The turn toward sound stems from a wider exhaustion with the visual, according to Khalaf.

“In the world today, I think that there’s an unprecedented amount of polycrisis,” Khalaf said. “In our phones and in our media, we are bombarded by a lot of images and a lot of language.”

The organizers are still confirming a final group of roughly seven more artists.

Performance and talk schedules and the list of projects will be released in stages.

The 2026 Busan Biennale runs through Nov. 1.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]