2026-06-15
[Press Release] Busan Biennale 2026 Unveils Venues and Highlight Participating Artists for Dissident Chorus
[Press Release] Busan Biennale 2026 Unveils Venues and Highlight Participating Artists for Dissident ChorusThe 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, rhyt
