Busan, a port city, has long encountered the world through the sea. As people and goods moved through the city and cycles of migration and settlement unfolded, different lives and cultures travelled across land and sea, flowing into Busan and intersecting here. For Busan, the sea has been less a boundary separating it from the world than a passage connecting it to other places and people. Founded in 2002, the Busan Biennale has built on this history and identity to create a space for cultural exchange where the local and the global meet.
Biennales across the world engage with many of the pressing issues of our time, yet increasingly similar discourses and exhibition formats recur. Rather than reducing the complexities of the world to a single answer, art reveals differences and contradictions that we may have failed to see, allowing us to see the familiar world through unfamiliar modes of perception. It is time to look beyond how many countries and artists participate and consider instead how global issues can be read through the history and lived realities of a particular city, and how they might, in turn, give rise to new questions.
For the Busan Biennale 2026, Evelyn Simons and Amal Khalaf were selected as Co-Artistic Directors through a two-stage review process following an international open call that attracted applications from 69 curators and curatorial teams from around the world. Under the theme Dissident Chorus, the two directors turn their attention to sounds that have often gone unheard, memories that have remained outside the records, and the realities that lie behind them. They consider how experiences rooted in different places and histories meet and intersect through bodies and sound, images and objects, exploring the possibility of forming relationships and existing together without erasing differences. The collaborative process through which the two directors and participating artists share distinct perspectives and sensibilities in shaping the exhibition also reflects these concerns.
The two directors’ approaches are distinct yet intersecting. Both attend to what established languages and records have failed to contain, finding other possibilities in sound and listening. Amal Khalaf attunes herself to sounds that emerge from beyond the languages and forms shaped by authority and institutions, asking how relationships and solidarities might be formed without erasing differences. Evelyn Simons focuses on the diverse practices generated through bodies and sound—from song and dance to ritual, performance, and protest—reading Busan’s histories of the port and refuge, life and labour, and democratisation as a “history of sound.”
Within these practices, the body becomes a living archive that holds and transmits memory. Different forms and sensibilities collide and intersect, yet this chorus has no conductor. Here, listening does not mean resolving differences into a single harmony, but discovering other possibilities that have yet to emerge within those differences. Songs and cries arising from different lives, along with the sounds of conflict and resistance, coexist and form relations with one another. This, perhaps, is the form of community the two directors envision.
Bringing together 46 artists and collectives (49 individuals) from 22 countries, the exhibition unfolds across the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Space OneZ, formerly a warehouse for ship equipment, and the former Busan Nam High School. Approximately 70 percent of the participating artists present new works commissioned for this Biennale. These sites are not simply exhibition venues; they are spaces that hold traces of Busan’s histories of industry and labour, education and everyday life. As the sensibilities and memories of artists from different backgrounds move through these places, where layers of time have accumulated, they encounter Busan’s history and generate new stories and questions.
When artists from around the world encounter Busan’s histories and places, the global and the local need not stand in opposition; rather, they can become conditions that allow each to be seen differently. The local is not a peripheral narrative set against global discourse, but a perspective through which we can understand and interpret the world we inhabit together in different ways. What matters is that a biennale does not simply transplant contemporary discourses into a local context, but reinterprets them through local experience, leaving behind new relationships and questions long after the exhibition has ended.
Rather than offering definitive answers, we hope that the Busan Biennale will remain an open space where people can meet, listen, and ask questions, and where solidarity can take shape amid difference. Just as different sounds carried across the sea meet and intersect in Busan before travelling outward again into the world, we envision Busan continuing to be a city that welcomes diverse cultures and sensibilities while speaking back to the world through its own histories and memories.
Joon Lee
Executive Director of the Busan Biennale Organizing Committee