The latest edition, Dissident Chorus, explores how worldly things overflow their bounds – like sound, like cultures, like water – and fancies itself a rebel. But is dissidence something you can curate?
The water directly outside the former warehouse Space OneZ in Busan’s port area is filled with filthy, floating trash: plastic bags, plastic kegs, plastic drums. That’s what humans do to water: pollute it. Space OneZ is one of three venues (collectively housing the works of 49 artists and collectives) hosting the 2026 Busan Biennale. For the artistic directors, Evelyn Simons and Amal Khalaf, water isn’t just a rubbish dump; rather, it’s a key metaphor for and crucial organising element of their sound-focused exhibition Dissident Chorus. ‘Sound, like water, resists containment,’ they write, ‘erodes borders, and carries memory without permission.’ In case that last bit wasn’t obvious, the exterior of Space OneZ is ‘flyposted’, like an illegal rave venue, with placards overlapping at crazy angles and sporting various graphic iterations of the biennial title. Although here, of course, the chaos is legal and organised. So much so that, looking at the flyposters is like listening to the chorus of Cole Porter’s politely rebellious 1927 ditty Let’s Misbehave: “That’s so contagious, Let’s be outrageous, Let’s misbehave!” It’s not so clear that dissidence is something you can curate. But Simons and Khalaf certainly give it a go.
Inside, Joar Songcuya’s The Seamanship Project (2021–), which comprises more than 100 small paintings on canvas documenting the life of bodies (mainly human) at sea: we see various scenes of orange-jumpsuited individuals hauling cargo, resisting turbulent seas, untangling ropes and hoses, and sometimes even relaxing, as well as representations of various marine flotsam and jetsam, hung salon-style across temporary chain-link walls. The rough, industrial installation and apparently rapid execution of the paintings cuts through any poetry to make an obvious connection to what’s going on in the port and dirty waters outside. This, in turn, parallels an installation of maps, album covers and other artwork by Drexciya / Abu Qadim Haqq that charts the relations of influence, solidarity, memorialisation and inspiration between the Detroit techno scene (Drexciya were an electro duo) and Afrofuturism of the 1990s with the legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade that peaked between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. And literally and conceptually in between all that sits Martinican Julien Creuzet’s video ZUMBI ZUMBI ETERNO (2023). It’s circled by an installation of cars shrouded in motley dustcovers that seem to evoke light refracted on a seabed, with each car crowned by totems and nestling offerings of fruit and grains. The digitally animated video itself combines scenes of tropical fish, spinning idols, bacterial sea-life and a chanted song dedicated to the Zumbi of the title (ancestral and indigenous knowledge is one of the themes highlighted throughout the biennial) to expand that Caribbean imaginary and reclaim the idea of the Zumbi as a source of life rather than of death as the white colonial imaginary has it. Which perhaps echoes what the biennial’s curators are trying to do in relation to the dirty sea outside. Here the sea is a vortex of creolisation – of ideas, experiences, bodies (human and nonhuman), histories and relationships. You leave thinking that everything is in a constant churn.
Over at the Former Busan Nam High School (classrooms intact), Lee Dong-Keun’s Three Islands trilogy (2020–26), comprising photographs, archival materials, videos and sloganeering, looks at the other ways humans can pollute the planet. In this case, via the messed-up colonial, military and postcolonial geopolitics that have conspired to make Busan’s Gadeokdo, Japan’s Okinawa and Taiwan’s Kinmen islands sites of division and uprootedness for both the places and the people who live on them. ‘Second Taiwan State Crisis’, ‘Export Controls’, ‘Peace and Stability’ are some of the slogans applied in vinyl text to the wall, at the same jaunty angles as those flyposters at the port. And while that may be a somewhat clumsy attempt (with shades of Lawrence Weiner) to flag the subversiveness that comes with openly airing histories and realities that political politeness or necessity might make it difficult (or impossible in some places) to air, that doesn’t save this work from having the faint odour of a history lesson; and that Cole Porter song from playing in your head. Similarly instructive is Ultra-red’s installation Protocols for Collective Listening, which collects audio fieldwork (instructions on how to listen to and record the sound of your surroundings) from cities around the world. The Busan edition (2026) comprises a microphone outside the school building transmitting its recordings into one of the classrooms, ‘inviting visitors to experience the familiar city from a different perspective’. Visitors are (according to the listening ‘protocols’ taped to the wall like some sort of manifesto) invited to record their responses to the listenings (the protocols include advice in what to consider, what to discuss and what you will hear) at a school desk using provided pen and paper. To counteract that, each of the three classrooms occupied by the work has the desks and chairs arranged differently – stacked, piled, in circles, thrown on top of each other; neat, messy – as if to remind you that the teacher is unruly. Despite all the rules. Or perhaps that you, the viewer, should be. If you’re not starting to feel that way already.
There’s no need for any regulation or counterregulation, though, in Mongolian Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar’s Resonance of the Vernacular (2026), a classroom-size installation of 15 customised chairs and a pimped-up blackboard. The latter – the last lesson still chalked up – is punctured by animal horns and irregularly shaped mirrors. Facing that, the Frankensteined chairs, variously assembled from and embellished with car parts, dental casts, (faux) furs, more horns, rebar, abacuses and suitcases, among other items, are all elevated in a manner (a label tells us) similar to those sat on by sellers in an outdoor market in the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar. (You never stop learning here.) Together, they speak of individuals in a collective, the accumulation of personal and material histories, and how, on some level, art can be about having fun. Which is something of a relief amid all the preaching and teaching going on in general. The same is true of US-based Pakistani Fatima Kaleem Khan’s similarly classroom-sized installation Spilt Milk (2026). In it, the chairs and tables, now serving as plinths, support a series of cereal boxes, decorated with embroidered fabrics (which sometimes have the quality of a burqa or niqab designed to cover or fit over the box), spewing loose trails of dark fake hair from underneath and their fronts displaying painted scenes of women’s lives (eating cereal, watching TV, thinking, contemplating, comforting one another, screaming) in a manner that gives each box the quality of a homemade TV set. The accompanying label tells us that the cereal brand on the boxes, Fauji, is ‘produced by a subsidiary of the same military-industrial network [in Pakistan] that also funds state television and shapes school curricula’. But the installation itself has already suggested that far more eloquently. Indeed, sometimes the lesson doesn’t need to be spelled out by the now standard museological drive to didacticism (which here, given the setting, appears schoolteacherish). The Unmute Water Project’s field recordings of Busan’s groundwater, tricking, gurgling and available via Soundcloud or a series of headphones casually draped over window railings, are some of the most simple and poetic works in the show.
Ultimately, however, this show is something of a mixed bag. Perhaps the biennial’s theme itself set us up for that: what is dissidence, after all, without difference. But there are certainly times when the biennial’s final venue, the Busan Museum of Art, starts to feel like little more than a jumble of stuff in which themes start to dissipate and convergence is harder to find. Multidisciplinary Thai artist Tanat Teeradakorn’s installation Memory Threshold: Chaos Resonance (2026) literally looks like a display of the contents of a teenager’s shopping bag: Day-Glo T-shirts, key chains and banners (with slogans such as ‘The Rise and Fall of an Absolutism’, or the syntactically bizarre ‘WE ARE MARCHING ©N: KEEP FAITH N F©LL©W US’) are arranged like a merchandising stall at a rock concert or perhaps a protest march. It’s hard to figure out which, visually, although an accompanying soundtrack that includes The Internationale does perhaps nudge us in one direction. And yet the museum is also home to two of the most vital works in the show. Shuang Li’s Alliance (Heart Loop) (2026), a swirling, six-channel video installation played out across a series of curving screens, with documentary-style footage and virtual animation that brings together the worlds of storm chasing (Alliance, Nebraska, sits at the heart of the area known as Tornado Alley) and digital sex dolls to present a vision of a world tearing itself apart. Umi Ishihara’s Nocturnal Melody (2026) is a videowork that blends documentary and fantasy to tell the stories of two female nightclub dancers based in Tokyo. Tracing their lives from childhood recollections to their dreams of the future, the work powerfully presents the pair as empowered and in control of their lives, doing for the stereotype of the pole-dancer what Creuzet did to the stereotype of the Zumbi back in Space OneZ. Appropriately, then, Joar Songcuya’s record of maritime life finds a reprise here in a stunning set of six canvas scrolls, each spanning almost four-and-a-half metres, Sa Bug-os Nga Kalibutan sang Napulo Ka Tuig (Around the World in Ten Years) (2026), that document the clashes of nature and industry, and the wonders and horrors of life at sea.
Busan Biennale 2026: Dissident Chorus, Various venues, Busan, 29 August – 1 November
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