Busan's 2026 biennale has entered its final fortnight with a deliberately discordant pitch. Staged under the title 'Dissident Chorus', the edition gathers 46 artists and collectives from 22 countries across three venues in the port city's waterfront district: the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, the former Busan South High School and Space OneZ. It closes on November 1.

Co-artistic directors Evelyn Simons and Amal Khalaf, based in Brussels and London respectively, say they wanted to respond to a world saturated with aggressive imagery, violent language and surveillance by turning instead to sound, the body and poetry. The result is an exhibition that treats the senses as instruments of refusal, opening paths toward resistance, solace and closeness rather than spectacle.

Among the standouts, Yazan Khalili greets visitors with 39 embroidered caps, each stitched with a single line of an ongoing poem; every cap is for sale, so fragments of the text disperse into the city on the heads of strangers. Thanat Teeradakorn stages a souvenir-shop installation where protest songs — from 'The Internationale' to Girls' Generation's 'Into the New World', an anthem of Korean student movements — blast from megaphones, showing how pop anthems can carry solidarity. Ryu Seongsil hoists twelve singing mannequins on an aerial work platform in 'Ten Thousand Dreams', satirising the global growth narrative that treats personal achievement as economic fuel.

The programme also reaches deep into personal and collective memory. Busan-based Lee Dong-geun has followed a troupe of North Korean defectors performing Arirang folk song for over a decade, recording what lies behind the glamour of their shows. Filmmaker Umi Ishihara builds an installation from her 'Nightly' video series, tracing suppressed identities through dancers talking backstage and in clubs. And a late Kang Seokyung — who died last year — receives a large room of 26 works developed from the traditional Korean musical notation system Jeongganbo, in which units of sound become grids of painting and sculpture.