Busan Biennale 2026, “Dissident Chorus”

You hear the work before you see it: voices spilling out of Space OneZ, a portside warehouse on Yeongdo Island in the south of Busan, mingling with traffic and the thuds and clanks of vessels at the nearby harbor. Within the venue, the air thickens with overlapping a cappella voices emanating from a circle of speakers on spindly stands. A jagged section feels like a packed train filled with anxious mouth-breathers (“I can feel the friction / frick / frick your friction”), before opening into a tranquilizing wash of hymnal chords that bathe the listener in silvery harmonies (“always becoming, becoming, becoming … I become the sea … I am the sea…”).

Devised with a local women’s choir, this evocative work is part of Jota Mombaça’s installation drowning is not a poem, but it’s not not a poem either (song of the siren). Speaking of fracture and communion, this newly commissioned work appears in this year’s sound-heavy Busan Biennale, “Dissident Chorus,” which explores how “embodied and sonic practices can become tools for communication, healing, and resistance,” as the press materials put it. Drawing on protest songs, rap, Afrofuturist techno, music by visually impaired teenagers, motivational chants by trans women, and field recordings of dripping water, the show explores “how sound, like water, resists containment.” It is an uneven biennial, more conceptually focused and powerful in its off-sites than in the main venue, the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art. Yet its clear ideological positioning—an open celebration of underdogs and dissent—makes it an accidental foil to the political quarrels plaguing the concurrent Gwangju Biennale.1

“Dissident Chorus” takes a stand. At its most confident, it uses sound’s entanglements—from leakages between adjoining gallery spaces to its power to structure space and mobilize bodies—to celebrate all sorts of disobedience, civil or otherwise. Its ambitions, unfolding in a trio of “movements” across three spaces, are most fully realized at Space OneZ and the disused Busan Nam High School, where the works resonate particularly well with their surroundings.

The six-artist showcase at Space OneZ taps into Busan’s maritime culture and the stories and histories held by the open seas. A sailor’s life unfolds in Joar Songcuya’s colorful paintings of commercial ships and swirling reds and blues that evoke nautical and emotional weather. The motif of the deep ocean as a place of transformation continues in Julien Creuzet’s video installation ZUMBI ZUMBI ETERNO (2023), which reclaims the legacy of Zumbi dos Palmares, a leading figure of anti-colonial resistance in Brazil. Playing on Zumbi/zombie, Creuzet sings a jazzy song-poem referring to Haitian Vodou, while an animated human body drifts through the ocean with pufferfish and datura flowers, both purported ingredients in zombification.

Farther south, at the former Busan Nam High School, we learn from rogue teachers and bad students. Artist-activist collective Ultra-red’s Protocols for Collective Listening, adapted from installations made across different cities from 2009 to ’11, offers guidelines for organizing soundwalks and listening sessions on texts pinned to the wall (pro tip for community fieldwork: “Provide plenty of food”). In every classroom the works occupy, tables and chairs are arranged to encourage different relations: in one, chairs form a spiral; in another, they are stacked in a crazy pile like a barricade against invading zombies (perhaps a nod to the Korean passion for the undead in TV and cinema). Fatima Kaleem Khan’s appropriation of the “bad woman” archetype in South Asian TV serials becomes a cheerfully malevolent assemblage of sour, sneering, side-eyeing protagonists painted on canvases and cereal boxes on study desks (Spilt Milk, 2026)—mean girls with flowing hair described in a video poem-manifesto, playing on a standalone screen next to the classroom’s blackboard, as “glorious, vengeful, demure.”

Heaven Baek’s extraordinary video installation Grass-Grown Corps Over the Sea and the Mountains (2026) rewrites the story of uncompensated Korean wartime laborers conscripted into labor by the Japanese during World War II. Its title comes from the ultranationalist Japanese military anthem “Umi Yukaba”: “If I go to sea, / Let me become a water-washed corpse; / If to the mountains, / A grass-grown corpse.” Drawing on oral testimonies of the Joseon Women’s Volunteer Labour Corps, Baek reverses the original song’s stoic death drive into a bittersweet celebration of resilience. Catchy electropop accompanies images of black kelp, military bunkers, and an elderly veteran, while text excerpts of the oral testimonies convey the women’s plucky aspirations before they knew the brutal reality of unpaid munitions-factory labor: “I shall return safe! Let us go to win!” Doomed though they are, these hopes eventually open up to a joyful vision of eternity: “Dancing corps / Forever and forever / farther and farther.”

Given the resonant, site-specific frequencies established at these venues, the curation at the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art feels more staid and generic. Alongside sound and social action are familiar curatorial tropes—ancestral knowledge, speculative worlds, subcultural practices—and a few needlessly large installations for visual drama. Still, there are potent moments, almost all of them sound-led. Zahra Malkani’s video installation The Wanderers Taught Me Longing, the Mystics Taught Me Lament (2026) features lullabies and sacred songs speaking elliptically of brutality and traditions of resistance. “Listen,” read the final lines of text, set against footage of birds wheeling in a gray sky. “All the splendors of love and joy / All the wealth in these streets / Until it is not all ours / There is no rest.” The words are accompanied by a dull, slow drumbeat that, almost against one’s will, rocks one’s body back and forth, back and forth; it is the rhythm of devotion and endurance, a score for the unfinished business of struggle.