TAIPEI – When the Taipei Biennial 2025 opens at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum on 1st November, it’s set to use contemporary art to ignite a dialogue about what it means to long, together. Curated by Berlin-based duo Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, this edition, Whispers on the Horizon, reimagines yearning not as nostalgia but as an urgent and collective force, a pursuit of belonging, recognition, and connection in a fractured present.

That spirit of longing finds expression in the Biennial’s newly commissioned works. One of the most anticipated is Korakrit Arunanondchai’s “Love after Death,” where myth and memory intermingle in ghostly projections. Spirits and monkeys, believed to channel the dead, flicker across transparent screens in a ritual that transforms grief into a meditation on transfiguration. “It asks,” say the curators, “how loss can turn ash into gold.”

Elsewhere, Omar Mismar’s “Still My Eyes Water” gathers a monumental bouquet of artificial flowers. Inspired by the nineteenth-century Flowers of Palestine, the work evokes a land suspended between presence and fading memory, perfect to behold yet scentless, like a place held tight but always slipping away.

For Taiwanese artist Zih-Yan Ciou, yearning takes the form of reconstruction. His Fake Airfield resurrects a colonial decoy site, complete with a handmade Zero fighter plane and a fictional film, weaving together the threads of Taiwan’s history, invention, and his own Hakka heritage. It is a reminder, as Bardaouil and Fellrath note, that “history itself is an act of invention, always fragile, always open to retelling.”

The Biennial’s immersive installations extend this invitation into shared spaces of fragility and possibility. Álvaro Urbano transforms the museum into a silent theater where objects glow and fade under shifting light, blurring the line between stage and collection. In another gallery, Fatma Abdulhadi cultivates a fragrant basil garden enclosed by printed mesh, preserving rituals of care and remembrance in a world that so often forgets. And Gaëlle Choisne fills a room with thousands of handmade fortune cookies, each concealing a seed or a secret, a quiet nod to unseen labor and misattributed cultural histories, as well as to the hidden futures they carry.

As much as Whispers on the Horizon is about art on display, it is equally about conversation. The opening weekend on 1 and 2 November expands the exhibition into a living forum. Alongside a live performance by Jacopo Benassi, a two-day program of six panels will bring together nearly thirty artists, writers, and scholars to explore themes of dissonance, belonging, and shared futures. Among the participants are Taiwanese novelist Wu Ming-Yi, whose writings often intertwine memory and ecology; pioneering installation artist Mona Hatoum; sculptor Ivana Bašić, known for her visceral explorations of fragility; and filmmaker Wu Chia-Yun. These discussions promise to deepen the exhibition’s inquiry into how art can resist erasure, challenge disinformation, and open spaces for connection.

“What strikes us today,” the curators explain, “is how yearning is no longer only an individual expression but something profoundly collective. Everywhere we look, there is a longing for clarity in the face of disinformation, for belonging in fractured communities, for connection in times of division.” The works of the Biennial, they stress, do not resolve these tensions. Instead, they make them tangible, “alive, urgent, and shared in the present.”

The Taipei Biennial 2025 is a place of encounters. Through myth and memory, fragility and invention, it creates a terrain where whispers rise into voices, urging us to listen differently and to imagine futures not yet written.

The 2025 Taipei Biennial runs from 1st November 2025 to 29th March 2026. More information available here