Alison Nguyen's Perforation, Ellipse will be featured in the Busan Biennale 2026, Dissident Chorus, from 29 August to 1 November 2026.
Busan Biennale 2026, Dissident Chorus
Exhibition Period: 29 August - 1 November 2026.
Venue: Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Space OneZ, Former Busan Nam High School
The 2026 Busan Biennale will open under the title “Dissident Chorus” on Aug. 29, with 44 artists and teams from 23 countries spread across three venues on two of the city’s islands. The Busan Biennale this year is conceived as a “polyphonic score” in three movements, according to the organizers. The first will call the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art on Eulsuk Island its home, with the museum to display works on ecology, care and regeneration, anchored to the island’s status as a protected bird habitat.
Space One-Z, a former ship-equipment warehouse on Yeongdo Island’s waterfront, will host the second movement focusing on labor, the sea and diasporic memory. The third movement will unfold inside the former Busan Nam High School — vacant since early this year — which the curators are treating as a rehearsal space for questions about pedagogy and collective knowledge.
“This biennale, for us, is a score that unfolds over three movements,” explained Amal Khalaf, the co-director of this year’s biennale, during a press conference for the event at the Seoul Press Center in Jung District, central Seoul, on Wednesday. “Busan, as a city, for anybody who has spent time there, feels both very haunted and very alive.”
Text and image courtesy of the Busan Biennale.
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Perforation, Ellipse debuted in January 2026 at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, curated by Jessica Kwok, and examines how cultural memory is transmitted and disrupted through a projected 16mm performance of Alison Nguyen shooting an arrow across a night skyline—suspended in perpetual arrival and departure, echoing Zeno’s paradox—alongside sculptural video fragments and a shifting architecture of screens that weaves excerpts from Aisle 9 with sensorial abstraction and archival online footage of Vietnamese bolero. Set in a speculative future, Aisle 9 follows after-hours hosiery-warehouse workers as foreclosure nears; a stray arrow leads them to hidden boxes from an unknown tech company filled with banned media, which they screen in an improvised viewing room.
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Korea JoongAng Daily | Busan Biennale 2026, Dissident Chorus
