This year’s Taipei Biennial, titled Whispers on the Horizon, opened on 1 November and will run until 29 March 2026. The 14th edition presents 72 artists from 37 global cities, with a strong focus on 34 new commissions and site-specific installations exploring themes of collective yearning, memory and cultural dialogue at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, the directors of Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.
In our conversation, Bardaouil speaks about the specific DNA of the biennial, what informs it and how, if we see the curatorial as living organisms we can create rhythm and listen: “listen until the institution begins to speak back. Listen until the work starts to speak back. Instead of coming with a finished text that you want to superimpose on a situation”.
Nisha Merit Whispers on the Horizon sounds like a promising moment of something to come – a yearning, as it is written. Given that the art world is very confused at the moment, seemingly hovering between the feeling that everything is breaking apart and the sense that it is stronger than ever, what is on the horizon?
Sam Bardaouil I wish I was a fortune-teller, but sometimes curating is a form of sensing what is to come. I would say what’s on the horizon is neither an apocalypse, nor a triumph and a resolution, but perhaps a moment of reorientation. We’re inhabiting a moment filled with uncertainties. Everything seems to be dissolving. Institutions are contested, narratives are fractured, communities feel very opposed and exposed at the same time. There’s an unprecedented urgency that we’re all feeling in terms of how we can reimagine what we do as institutions, as curators, as artists. We need to reevaluate our role, but then really do it better, with more commitment and more passion.
In a sense, Whispers on the Horizon proposes that transformation may not arrive through proclamation, through grand gestures, or through the terminology that we’ve sometimes adopted uncritically in our practices. Instead of these proclamations that now sound very hollow and unachievable, perhaps there has to be a quiet insistence – an atmosphere that allows contradiction to exist without being suppressed. We might have a certain opinion, but somebody else might be standing on the other spectrum – and they also have a place in the conversation. We need to stop shouting and listen to the whispers, because maybe the whispers are the places that save us.
The horizon, in a sense, is not only ahead. It’s not something far away; it’s already here, in the way artists are reconfiguring sensibility, and in how institutions learn to listen rather than broadcast. What comes next is art that refuses spectacle for the sake of spectacle and chooses attentiveness, ambiguity, relation.
NM Many of the participating artists were born after 1984. What are the questions these ‘young’ artists are asking? Especially looking at the many site-specific works, the Taipei Biennial presents.
SB Many of the questions they’re asking is: what still connects us across distance, across rupture, across digital saturation, ecological anxieties? They work through materials of fragility and transformation. You see rope, cardboard, wax, erased images, permeable sound. The architecture of the show really allows for this permeability. We didn’t build any walls – we’re working with textile partitions. Some of them are opaque, some transparent. There’s a lot of fluidity and things merging and yearning to connect, despite the fact that they are often very different.
The work the artists are doing is not just a symbolic gesture. I would say it’s an architecture of encounter – this yearning for connection – a physical, tangible, concrete way of expressing that. In that sense, site-specificity becomes more relational, not territorial. For the artists then, a wall is a membrane – a threshold where intimacy, migration, ecology, or grief even is sensed. This generation, when we talk about younger artists, is inventing ethics as aesthetics. I think it’s slowing circulation a little, tending to surfaces, choreographing vulnerability. They’re not asking Where do I belong? but How do we meet?
NM The whisper in itself is quite an interesting idea of something that is there but not tangible – something that gives you a sense of space, yet it is something you have to feel, not logically understand. Could you outline the main aspects or frameworks that guide this Biennale?
SB Till and I wanted to create an exhibition that you can only experience in Taiwan – Taipei. We did not want a show that could still feel or mean the same if you were to see it in Sydney or Berlin. The first time we were in Taipei was in 2014, and we’ve been back and developed a connection to the place. When we were asked to curate the Biennial, we immersed ourselves in a process of deep research, talking to many people who have been invested in disentangling the complexity of its modern history.nThis led us to three objects. The first is the puppet from Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film The Puppet Master from 1993, which is based on the life of the puppeteer Li Tian-lu. In the film, Li performs his memories of Japanese occupation, war, martial law, the arrival of the Nationalists from mainland China, and then modernisation and opening up. His puppet becomes an extension of himself. It becomes a vessel of endurance. It teaches him – and through him we see that history does not always speak in monuments, but in gestures, in repetition, in holding on to something familiar that becomes locale.
The second object is the diary from Chen Ying-zhen’s short story My Kid Brother Zhang Xiang. It is the only trace left of this young man who took his own life, unable to reconcile his ideals with the world in a time of fast change in Taiwan – this generation of the 60s and 70s. The sister reads the diary after he has passed away. It’s about this generation living through martial law, trying to understand how you reconcile oppressiveness with opening up, and the utopian idealism of youth with the reality of a far-from-perfect world.
The third is the bicycle from Wu Ming-yi’s The Stolen Bicycle from 2015. The short story is from 1996 and the novel from 2015. There is an intergenerational thread, which we wanted to expand by bringing in the TFAM collection – works from the 20s through to the 80s. In the novel, the narrator searches for his father’s missing bicycle because he thinks that if he finds the bicycle, he might be able to find his father again. It becomes a journey through Taiwan’s layered past – wartime migration, colonial infrastructure that still rears its head in many ways. The bicycle turns motion into remembrance. It made us think that longing or yearning is still something that moves, that surges, that refuses to disappear. Together these objects became conceptual anchors. Beyond these anchors, we started developing a bigger framework: how do you curate conditions, not themes? How can the exhibition architecture become a porous textile, a gradient of light, an opaque and translucent threshold that behaves like yearning itself? We wanted the Biennial to move like a breath, allowing artworks and visitors together to surface, dissolve and re-emerge.
NM I recently attended a panel conversation on the state and relevance of the curator. How do you see yourself within this discussion? What is both your curatorial guiding principle, especially given your extensive experience in collaborating, working together and co-authoring?
SB Co-authorship, co-curation, is a model we’ve built our entire practice in which we’ve been working together for 17 years. But it comes from a genuine conviction that nothing is authored completely in a solitary manner. I also find the word authorship very contested, we see curating more as an act of translation or custodianship of relations, ideas, spaces, opportunities, responsibility. Our guiding principle is actually very simple: listen until the institution begins to speak back. Listen until the work starts speaking back. Instead of coming with a finished text that you want to superimpose on a situation. That’s something we see a lot – curation becomes an act of projection. A projection of your own interests, your own interpretations. That’s legitimate to a certain extent, but it’s also a very aggressive act when you instrumentalise everything around you as building blocks to express yourself – when you’re the centre. For us it’s about enabling. It’s choreography, negotiation, care. To work together is not to merge voices, but to amplify the contradictions. It doesn’t mean there is always agreement – so how do you turn that into richness? How do you build architectures that hold difference rather than neutralising it?
Regarding the state and relevance of curators going forward, we need to move away from authorship or gatekeeping towards being social choreographers, dramaturges, translators, listeners – stewards for artists, for publics, but also stewards for uncertainty. Our role is to create atmospheres in which artworks and publics can shape one another. That is very important.
NM This Biennale, looking at both past and present, brings international and global conversations into a local context – one that, in the case of Taipei, is embedded in a complex history. How did you choose and prepare, and ultimately hold conversations across time and space while connecting them to a contemporary reality?
SB There’s that historical arc of works coming from the museums collection besides the more recent works and the new commissions. The way we try to hold these conversations across time and space, while remaining contemporary, is by refusing chronology as a hierarchy. Historical works are not background. They are living interlocutors for contemporary voices. To do that, we had to listen to Taiwan’s layered histories – colonial, Indigenous, migratory, democratic. The works from the collection were not there to illustrate moments or ideas; they were conditions shaping how longing is felt intergenerationally. You take a work and put it next to a new commission and it has the same agency and relevance, rather than “this came first, this came next”. If we talk about displacement, memory, belonging, they all emerge through the vantage point of Taiwan – as conveyed poetically, sometimes elusively, in the works from the collection, in dialogue with, in tandem with, and sometimes in confrontation with the contemporary works.
To do that, the key was not to create chronological hierarchy, but to work with formal resonance – to work with conditions the works evoke, even how they make your body feel. They come together meaningfully not because they both illustrate migration, but because they might share a physicality, echoed for example in the texture of Munahatun’s glass sculptures in gridded metal cages, and in the texture of rock surfaces in a photograph from the 1930s.
NM Regarding the psychology and inner workings of a biennale: how has it been for you to navigate, negotiate and facilitate the process between your curatorial ideas, the system and standing of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and the different and diverse artistic practices and individuals? Have you developed a methodology for this?
SB Of course you have to develop some sort of methodology when you have 72 artists and over 200 works spanning almost an entire century. But I wouldn’t say it’s so much a system as a disciplined way of operating. Our method always begins with listening. It’s a very important part of our curatorial process. Listening brings a certain energy or sensitivity into the process. Listening is part of the methodology: listening to people, to the building, to the artists, to their anxieties, to their imaginations. How do you bridge anxiety and imagination?
This is something you keep doing, and sometimes you have to revisit and adjust. At one point you also have to translate or transform that listening into an alignment. There has to be a form of alignment – locating where institutional capacities and artistic urgencies can intersect. That requires negotiation – not compromise. Attention to knowing when to insist, when to protect a certain space – mental, creative – and when to adapt.
This act of negotiation comes from active listening and arriving at a place of alignment. You can only do this if you treat the Biennial as a living organism composed of multiple nervous systems: the artistic nervous system, the institutional one, the civic one when it comes to public, audience, politicians. In a sense, our methodology is to choreograph rhythm rather than consensus and to allow friction without being afraid of it. Ensuring that the Biennial is learning from artists, which goes for any institution. You have to learn from artists; you have to let them push you. If I were to take one thing above all when thinking about methodology, I’d say: privilege ethics over spectacle. That doesn’t mean you can’t do beautiful, immersive works. But ultimately, a commitment to ethics should outshine spectacle. The psychology of a biennial, of a complex exhibition, of an institution, is delicate and layered. You have to navigate it, and you cannot navigate it without making care a structural principle towards everyone involved.
