The Busan Biennale Organizing Committee has unveiled the outline of the Busan Biennale 2026 by pre-releasing its main exhibition venues and a selection of participating artists.
 
The initial list of artists includes figures who represent key currents in contemporary Korean art, alongside internationally recognized practitioners who have garnered significant attention on the global stage.
 
Dew Kim explores the intersections of seemingly disparate elements—such as religion, fandom, K-pop, and BDSM—developing a practice that exposes and dismantles social norms and power structures. This approach closely resonates with the exhibition’s thematic focus on voices, experiences, and subjectivities that resist easy reconciliation.
 
Tai Shani, a co-recipient of the 2019 Turner Prize, will also participate. Drawing on mythological imagination, science fiction, and feminist aesthetics, Shani has consistently challenged established orders; in this exhibition, she is expected to present immersive works in which sensation and voice are intricately interwoven.
 
Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça engages language and sound as primary mediums to explore opacity, resistance, and anti-colonial imaginaries, questioning dominant anthropocentric perspectives. For this exhibition, Mombaça will collaborate with music producer Anti Ribeiro to create an auditory environment where human and non-human voices resonate together through underwater acoustics and collective vocalization.

Representing the French Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Julien Creuzet draws on the histories and sensibilities of the Caribbean to explore themes of the sea, migration, and identity through immersive installations. His new site-specific work for this exhibition is expected to enter into a close dialogue with Busan’s layered context—where urban, maritime, and migratory histories converge—thereby shaping a distinctive rhythm within the show.
 
Also participating is Nkisi, a Congolese-Belgian artist whose practice engages music and sound. By investigating phonographic archives, Nkisi presents works that question the colonial dynamics embedded in the recording and preservation of sound.
 
The lineup further includes Australian artist Bhenji Ra, who will present a video work, and Tanat Teeradakorn, whose practice calls forth the reverberations of erased or silenced voices while interrogating the politics of sound and state propaganda.

Meanwhile, the exhibition will take place across three venues, centered on the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art and extending to the former Busan Nam High School and Space Wonji in Yeongdo. Yeongdo is a key area representing Busan’s old downtown, where histories of refuge, migration, and settlement have accumulated around its port and shipbuilding industries.
 
The former Busan Nam High School, established in 1955, served as a site where the voices and daily rhythms of students gathered for nearly 70 years, until its final graduating class this February. This marks the first time the Busan Biennale has repurposed a vacated school building as an exhibition venue. Such an approach reveals the layered transformations of the city while offering a particularly dense cross-section of contemporary Busan.
 
Now functioning as a multidisciplinary cultural space, Space Wonji is an industrial heritage site that retains traces of its past as a ship supply warehouse. Within the ceaseless flow of goods and people that once defined the port, it became a site where movement, exchange, and collective labor accumulated over time. Today, it continues to operate as a space where diverse narratives, rhythms, and sensibilities intersect.

The Busan Biennale 2026, 《Dissident Chorus》, envisions not a choir in which countless voices converge into a single unified sound, but one that imagines newly produced resonances.
 
This pre-release offers a first glimpse into how this curatorial concept moves beyond an abstract proposition and takes concrete form through the interplay of sites and artists. The organizing committee plans to sequentially announce the full list of participating artists and detailed exhibition programs, gradually revealing how the exhibition unfolds and expands throughout the city of Busan.
 
Pre-announced Participating Artists
 
Suki Seokyeong Kang, Dew Kim, Bhenji Ra, Shuang Li, Nkisi, Minouk Lim, Joar Songcuya, Jota Mombaça, Julian Abraham “Togar,” Julien Creuzet, Tanat Teeradakorn, Tai Shani, R.I.P. Germain

References

• 부산비엔날레조직위원회 보도자료 (Busan Biennale Organizing Committee Press Release)