From sacred temples and national museums to contemporary galleries and bustling shopping districts, Bangkok’s fifth Art Biennale invites visitors to explore the shifting boundaries between the sacred and the everyday.

BANGKOK, THAILAND – Bangkok is preparing to become one vast contemporary art experience. Returning from 29 October 2026 to 28 February 2027, the fifth edition of the Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB) has unveiled its complete line-up of 72 artists and collectives for ANGELS & MARA, an ambitious city-wide exhibition that brings together works from Thailand and around the world.

Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, moving image, textiles, installation and performance, the Biennale explores the contradictions that shape contemporary life: desire and restraint, destruction and renewal, spirituality and materialism. Rather than treating these forces as straightforward opposites, ANGELS & MARA asks where they overlap, how they influence one another and what they reveal about the societies and individuals caught between them.

As in previous editions, the city itself is central to the experience. Contemporary works will appear in historic temples, museums, educational institutions, cultural venues and commercial districts, inviting visitors to encounter Bangkok through the interplay of its religious traditions, layered histories and rapidly changing urban landscape.

The 2026 Biennale expands its footprint with Alliance Française Bangkok joining the venue line-up. It will sit alongside Wat Arun, Wat Pho, Wat Prayoon, National Museum Bangkok, Art Centre Silpakorn University, Museum Siam, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), One Bangkok, centralwOrld and Siam Paragon.

The range is part of what makes the Biennale distinctive. A work encountered within a Buddhist temple carries a different resonance from one presented in a national collection or a contemporary commercial development. By placing art within spaces that already hold cultural, spiritual and social significance, BAB creates opportunities for visitors to consider how context shapes the way an artwork is seen and understood.

For those exploring the exhibition, this also means moving between different versions of Bangkok: the city of sacred architecture and ritual, the city of museums and public institutions, and the contemporary metropolis of shopping, commerce and everyday encounters.

The title ANGELS & MARA draws on Bangkok’s identity as the “City of Angels” and Mara, the figure associated with temptation, desire and the forces that obstruct enlightenment. Together, they establish a framework for examining the tensions that run through human experience, without insisting that virtue and vice, the sacred and the worldly, or destruction and renewal can always be neatly separated.

Several works make these contradictions tangible through material, image and the body itself. At Wat Pho, Japanese-Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura presents Memento Mori, a reclining bronze figure whose posture recalls both European funerary sculpture and the temple’s monumental Reclining Buddha. The work brings mortality and rebirth into conversation with Buddhist iconography. Her Wu-san and Ma-san; “Angel from Cologne” and “Devil from Cologne”, similarly evoke opposing forces that nevertheless belong to the same world.

At the National Museum Bangkok, Chinese artist Liu Jianhua presents Square (Siamese Triangle), a site-specific arrangement of steel and glazed porcelain in the Throne Hall. Its porcelain elements, suggestive of molten gold, reflect the hall’s vermilion ceiling while recalling centuries of ceramic exchange between China and Siam, including the traditions of benjarong and lai nam thong. Here, material becomes a way to connect artistic form with the movement of objects, techniques and cultural influences across borders.

Other artists turn their attention to the body as a site where social expectations and personal agency collide. Thai performance and tattoo artist Chomphunut Phuttha’s durational work WOMARA involves tattooing consenting participants with reversed texts drawn from traditional didactic proverbs for women. By reworking these inscriptions on the body, the artist confronts gendered histories of tattooing and questions who has the power to define how women should live.

Vietnamese artist Le Hien Minh examines another kind of cultural inscription in Lotusthetics, a fast-moving collage of images drawn from cinema, news, archives, celebrity culture and spiritual iconography. By placing these images in shifting relationships, the work challenges established representations of Asian women shaped by Orientalism, colonialism and ornamental stereotypes.

Transformation also emerges through the materials artists choose to work with. Thai textile artist Ploenchan Vinyaratn’s Vestibule is a woven passage assembled from surplus yarns, fabric scraps, cardboard and even broken pickleballs. Visitors enter one at a time, passing through a threshold built from materials that might otherwise have been discarded. The work suggests that transformation can begin with what is left behind, and that crossing a threshold may change how we see ourselves.

For Hmong artist Tcheu Siong, the unseen becomes visible through hand-stitched embroidery and reverse appliqué. Drawing on dreams, visions and Hmong cosmology, her textile works feature spirits, deities, ghosts and other symbolic figures. The intricate compositions give physical form to spiritual narratives and memories, reflecting a worldview in which the visible and invisible remain closely connected.

Nepalese artist Amrit Karki approaches the passage of time through the body and the promise of rest. In A Fallen Petal Floating on the River of Time, a participatory performance involving water and the image of a bed considers whether the body can truly surrender to stillness. The bed suggests renewal, while water evokes cleansing and the flow of time. Yet the work also raises a more uneasy question: how often do social expectations and the pursuit of achievement prevent us from finding peace?

Taken together, these practices show the breadth of ANGELS & MARA. Its artists work through very different cultural traditions and materials, but share an interest in what lies beneath the familiar surface of everyday life, the histories embedded in objects, the expectations carried by bodies and the beliefs that shape how people understand the world.

The wider line-up includes internationally recognised names such as AES+F, Nobuyoshi Araki, Arahmaiani, Mel Chin, Amanda Coogan, Mandy El-Sayegh, Max Hooper Schneider, Yasumasa Morimura, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu and Bill Viola. They appear alongside artists from across Asia and beyond, including Singaporean artists Jason Lim and Ong Kian Peng, as well as a broad representation of Thai contemporary art.

The exhibition extends beyond its 11 official venues through two collaborative programmes, BAB Plus and BAB Fringe, connecting the Biennale with Bangkok’s wider network of contemporary art spaces. BAB Plus brings together One Bangkok Art & Culture Space, 100 Tonson Foundation, BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY, DIB 26 and Jim Thompson Art Center. Each will develop its own exhibition during the Biennale period, creating additional points of dialogue with ANGELS & MARA.

BAB Fringe adds another layer through collaborations with Rongsi 1984+1 Gallery, HELU-TRANS (THAILAND) and Warin Lab Nomad. These independently produced exhibitions will run alongside the main Biennale, broadening the range of artistic approaches and venues visitors can explore.

The programmes make the Biennale less a single exhibition to be visited in isolation and more a shared moment across the city’s contemporary art scene. Visitors can follow the official exhibition trail while discovering how independent galleries and cultural spaces respond to their own questions, audiences and artistic concerns.

Together, BAB, BAB Plus and BAB Fringe invite a wider view of Bangkok as a place where multiple art experiences can unfold at once connected by a common interest in the tensions between opposing forces, but open to many different interpretations.

With 72 participating artists and collectives, ANGELS & MARA offers a wide-ranging encounter with contemporary art, but its central question remains deliberately open-ended. Where does the angel end and Mara begin? The answer may shift depending on the work, the venue and the person looking at it.

Some works approach spirituality through ritual and iconography; others examine gender, identity, political histories, ecology, technology or the circulation of images. Still others find meaning in everyday materials, personal memory or the body’s relationship with time. Rather than imposing a single interpretation, the Biennale allows these perspectives to sit alongside one another.

That openness is especially fitting for an exhibition spread across Bangkok’s temples, museums, public institutions and commercial spaces. The city becomes more than a backdrop: it is part of the conversation, with each venue bringing its own associations to the works it houses.

For visitors, the Biennale offers a reason to look again at familiar places and to explore parts of Bangkok through a different lens. Between sacred and secular spaces, established traditions and emerging practices, ANGELS & MARA presents a city and a world in which contradictions are not always resolved, but continually negotiated.

Photos courtesy of Bangkok Art Biennale

Bangkok Art Biennale 2026: ANGELS & MARA runs from 29th October 2026 to 28th February 2027. More information available here