DIVERSEartLA 2026 is a living examination of how contemporary art circulates, interfaces, and evolves across a global ecosystem of biennials and art institutions. This year, we present seven international Biennials, including Gwangju Biennial (Korea), Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador), NYLAAT Triennial (New York), SACO Biennial (Chile), and NoMade Biennial along with other significant platforms and leading institutions, all positioned within a shared ecological frame.

Since its founding in 1895, the Venice Biennale has remained the most influential model. After World War II, biennials and triennials across cities like São Paulo, Istanbul, and Johannesburg expanded global representation, embracing social critique and experimental media while navigating tensions around inclusion, markets, and cultural diplomacy.

Biennials invite urgency, experimentation, and immediacy. They illuminate emergent practices, foster cross-disciplinary collaboration, and host field-wide dialogues beyond the walls of traditional museums.

Art institutions provide durable memory, methodological rigor, and sustained programming, ensuring innovations are archived, contextualized, and accessible to future generations. Together, they form a dynamic continuum: sparks of innovation followed by reflection, stewardship, and dissemination, keeping the field responsive to diverse publics.

In Latin America and other regions contending with rapid sociopolitical change, biennials are re-emerging as laboratories of critical thought. They read and rewrite the conflicts of our time, migration, memory, community, body sovereignty, and territory, while foregrounding sustainability and resilience.

This edition pays particular attention to place: how venues, geography, and local communities shape biennial and museum activities, and how those activities, in turn, shape place through curatorial interventions, community projects, and participatory formats. You may encounter AGUAS, and other works that foreground care, connection, and collective action as a mode of inquiry and transformation.

DIVERSEartLA is curated by Marisa Caichiolo