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.”
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Ellipse, a series of wall works made of gold leaf gilded on metal, introduces the concept of nhạc vàng, or “yellow music”. As a result of North Vietnam winning the war, in 1975 Vietnamese bolero was banned for its sentimentality and romantic lyricism. Yet it continued to survive underground, circulating through diasporic cassette tapes and transnational cabarets. Nguyen transposed elements of sheet music and handwritten lyrics of songs that have been taken out of circulation onto solid aluminum plates, creating a counter-archive for memories that nearly disappeared.
In the 10-channel video installation Perforation, Ellipse V01, multiple screens move in a ghostly choreography, reflecting on the passage of time and the ways cultural memory is shaped through it. In the center of the space, a durational 16mm performance of the artist shooting an arrow across a dark New York City skyline initiates cuts in the constellation video footage. Melodies of bolero periodically surge across multiple channels, aligning disparate images from historical and personal archives into a shared emotional frequency.
Text courtesy of the Busan Biennale.
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Korea JoongAng Daily | Busan Biennale 2026, Dissident Chorus
