SITE Santa Fe has unveiled its next biennial, curated by Ekow Eshun as an invitation to imagine differently. The 13th SITE Santa Fe International, titled There Are Other Worlds, will run from 11 June 2027 to 10 January 2028, with 42 artists from more than 15 countries across six-plus venues in the New Mexico city. Founded in 1995, it is one of the United States' key contemporary art events; Eshun, who chairs London's Fourth Plinth, draws his programme from the region's layered history.

The show is organised into three sections Eshun calls interlocking territories. Worlds Beyond explores sensory and psychological perception, inspired by the Transcendental Painting Group active in New Mexico in the 1930s and 40s, and includes Olafur Eliasson. Worlds in Common draws on the state's utopian settlements to ask how art conjures connection and kinship, with Raven Chacon uncovering histories of displacement in the Americas. Worlds Alive treats the planet as a living territory, a theme Delcy Morelos approaches by treating the earth as physical and ethical ground.

New commissions come from Cauleen Smith, Sanford Biggers and Edgar Arceneaux, alongside Chacon and Lotus L. Kang. Nearly half the participants are from the United States, including Arthur Jafa and Nan Goldin, while five are based in New Mexico, among them the Indigenous artists Rose B. Simpson and Cannupa Hanska Luger. International names include Louise Giovanelli, John Akomfrah, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Shilpa Gupta and Tavares Strachan.

Eshun says the biennial is shaped by a moment of division, uncertainty, inequality and environmental crisis, and by his belief that artists hold complexity rather than resolving it. The show will carry a sense of possibility and even optimism, he said, with community programming at its centre: the biennial exists in conversation, not isolation, and its artists offer no answers but may open new ways of seeing and engaging with the present.