[Press Release] Busan Biennale 2026 Unveils Venues and Highlight Participating Artists for Dissident Chorus
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[Press Release] Busan Biennale 2026 Unveils Venues and Highlight Participating Artists for Dissident Chorus
The Busan Biennale Organizing Committee has unveiled the venues and a first group of artists and collectives of its 2026 edition. Led by co-artistic directors Evelyn Simons and Amal Khalaf, the exhibition will take place from 29 August to 1 November 2026 under the title Dissident Chorus.
In the port city of Busan, Dissident Chorus is rooted in the belief that sound, like water, resists containment, erodes borders, and carries memory without permission. It invites audiences into a collective performance where voices and sounds overlap and accumulate into a resonant whole. The curatorial theme envisions the exhibition as a choral body - an assembly of polyphonous voices that build together into a living, breathing, resonant composition. The artworks featured in the biennale will vibrate alongside the city’s historical hum and maritime echoes, connecting collective memory with contemporary sensibilities.
“This edition of Busan Biennale is not simply an exhibition about sound, but a rehearsal for other ways of being together,” Evelyn and Amal notes, “To gather in Busan is to stand on ground that has always known sound’s organizing power. From work songs that built a nation to club sounds that forge temporary communities, these sonic practices are bound together by a common pulse: the refusal to be silenced.”
Dissident Chorus presents a field of resonances, a chorus without conductor, a messy aligning of bodies and artistic practices. Moving like sound: appearing, disappearing, and returning, refusing silence, the exhibition insists on presence, and carries the possibility of another future.
Amidst the ruins of speech, Dissident Chorus returns to language’s potential to hold ambiguity, complexity and secrets - to be more unruly than words. The exhibition expands language beyond grammar and sanctioned speech, exploring its positions in gesture, breath, rhythm, and the tremble of bodies held in proximity. Through collective sounding, voices and bodies emerge as alternative political registers. Aligning with Judith Butler’s notion of “bodies in alliance”, the biennale underscores how political agency and autonomy can be reclaimed through presence, and through the act of appearing together.
Busan Biennale 2026 will unfold across three venues across the city, encompassing Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Former Busan Nam High School and Space OneZ. Former Busan Nam High School and Space OneZ are both located in Yeongdo island, an area shaped by layered histories of port activity, shipbuilding, migration, and settlement.
Former Busan Nam High School carries nearly seventy years of accumulated voices, daily rhythms and collective memory. Vacated earlier this year following the school’s relocation, the site retains traces of education and communal life. These layers bring the changing realities of contemporary Busan into direct conversation with the exhibition. It provides a framework to question modes of education and look into alternative approaches to pedagogy; learning through sound, oral knowledge transmissions and bottom-up archives rooted in dissent.
Located in the dockside area facing Busan North Port, Space OneZ, occupies a former marine-supplies warehouse. Its industrial fabric still holds the memory of circulation, labour and logistics, but also of clandestine club nights, offering a setting where different historical layers and social narratives remain physically present.
Source: http://www.busanbiennale.org/
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