The Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale has announced the title, concept and key visual of the ninth edition of Japan's leading international triennial. Whalefall: News and Rumours from the Ocean Floor will open on 23 April 2027 at the Yokohama Museum of Art and run until 12 September, under artistic directors Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero. The announcement was made on 4 November 2026.

The title draws on two deep-sea phenomena that also appear in Japanese folk tales. The oarfish, a creature of the deep, is believed to foretell disaster when it rises to the surface, a messenger carrying news and rumours. A whale fall is what happens when a whale's enormous body sinks to the ocean floor, where it feeds a whole ecosystem for decades. The museum itself is imagined as the body of a whale, a vessel for the exhibition.

Costinas and Guerrero were appointed after a selection process that considered 22 candidates recommended by 13 Japanese and international organisations. Costinas, born in Romania in 1982, is a writer and curator who until the end of 2026 serves as senior curator of exhibition practices at HKW in Berlin; Guerrero, born in Bogota in 1983, is an art historian and adjunct professor at the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong. The pair previously worked together on the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, in 2024, and they are the third team of international curators to lead Yokohama, following Raqs Media Collective in 2020 and Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu in 2024.

The key visual was created by Studio YUKIKO, a Berlin-based design agency. Founded in 2001, the Yokohama Triennale is organised by the City of Yokohama, the Yokohama Arts Foundation, the Japan Foundation and the public broadcaster NHK. The eighth edition, Wild Grass: Our Lives, ran from March to June 2024; the ninth will run for 124 days across the museum and other venues in the city.