BUSAN.- Busan Biennale 2026 announces the full list of participating artists and collectives for Dissident Chorus, led by co-artistic directors Evelyn Simons and Amal Khalaf. Taking place across three venues in Busan, South Korea the 2026 edition brings together 46 artists and collectives from 22 countries.
Set in Busan, a port city shaped by movement, labour, migration, maritime exchange, and histories of civic assembly, Dissident Chorus asks how sound can become a language of resistance and solidarity. Rooted in the belief that sound, like water, resists containment, the exhibition follows sonic and embodied practices as living forms of communication, healing, resistance, and relation.
From work songs and protest songs to ritual rhythms, club sounds, and collective chants, sound has long organised bodies, carried memory, and opened spaces of solidarity when language is restricted or exhausted. At the same time, Dissident Chorus returns to language’s potential to hold ambiguity, complexity, and secrets, moving beyond grammar and sanctioned speech to attend to gesture, breath, rhythm, and the presence of bodies gathered in proximity.
Within this framework, the final line-up brings together artists and collectives whose practices move across sound, music, performance, choreography, club culture, archival research, moving image, installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, and socially engaged work. Rather than presenting the biennale as a primarily visual encounter, their works give form to Dissident Chorus through voices, bodies, scores, images, archives, radio broadcasts, maps, and live situations. Together, they treat sound as material, the body as archive, and assembly as a political form.
The exhibition unfolds across three venues as a polyphonic score, each site tuning into a distinct frequency within Busan’s larger resonance. The Busan Museum of Contemporary Art opens the first movement at an ecological threshold where river, sea, and bird migration routes converge, gathering practices of care, regeneration, and worldbuilding. The second movement unfolds at Space OneZ, a century-old marine warehouse in Yeongdo, carrying the exhibition into a lower register of port histories, labour, aquatic myth, and protest. At the Former Busan Nam High School, the final movement becomes a rehearsal space for bottom-up knowledge, oral histories, censored materials, and futures still forming.
Alongside the exhibition, Busan Biennale 2026 will present performances, sound projects, artist talks, and public programmes throughout the biennale period, extending the exhibition as a space for listening, gathering, and learning together. Further details will be announced in due course.
List of participants: 5D (Sammy Lee, Mark Lowe, Sarah Shin) (Canada and United Kingdom), Aliaskar Abarkas (Iran / United Kingdom), Alison Nguyen (United States), Bhenji Ra (Australia), Brahim Tall (Belgium), Dew Kim (South Korea), Drexciya / Gerald Donald (United States), Éric Baudelaire (France), Eunji Cho (South Korea), Fatima Kaleem Khan (Pakistan), Guely Morató Loredo (Bolivia), Heaven Baek (South Korea), Hyunsung Park (South Korea), Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar (Mongolia), Joar Songcuya (Philippines), Joon Yoo (South Korea), Joshua Serafin (Philippines), Jota Mombaça (Brazil), Julian Abraham “Togar” (Indonesia), Julien Creuzet (France), Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (Sudan), Lala Rukh (Pakistan), Lara Ögel (Türkiye), Lee Dong-Keun (South Korea), Luiz Roque (Brazil), Minouk Lim (South Korea), Mira Mann (Germany), Moe Satt (Myanmar), Natasha Tontey (Indonesia), Nkisi (Belgium), R.I.P. Germain (United Kingdom), Shuang Li (China), Sojung Jun (South Korea), Suki Seokyeong Kang (South Korea), Sungeun Kim (South Korea), Sungsil Ryu (South Korea), Tai Shani (United Kingdom), Tanat Teeradakorn (Thailand), The House of Korean Protest Songs (South Korea), Tianzhuo Chen (China), Tom Hallet (Belgium), Ultra-red (Multinational), Umi Ishihara (Japan), Ursula K. Le Guin (United States), Yazan Khalili (Palestine), and Zahra Malkani (Pakistan)
