Bienal de Saõ Paulo Names Artists for 2023 Edition, Including Igshaan Adams, Julien Creuzet, Torkwase Dyson, and Ellen Gallagher

This article was originally published on April 27, 2023, with the initial 43-artist list. It was been updated on June 29, 2023, with the complete artist list.

The Bienal de São Paulo has announced the complete list of artists that will take part in its upcoming 35 edition, slated to open in September.

The exhibition’s four curators—Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes, and Manuel Borja-Villel—have selected 120 participants. This iteration will likely be its most diverse, with 92 percent of the artists announced so far identifying as Black, Indigenous, and/or non-white and 76 percent coming from the Global South or “locations outside the hegemonic circuit,” according to a press release.

A number of closely watched artists will feature in the exhibition, including Igshaan Adams, Julien Creuzet, Torkwase Dyson, Ellen Gallagher, Duane Linklater, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Dayanita Singh, and Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz. The exhibition, which carries the title “choreographies of the impossible,” will also include several deceased artists, such as stanley brouwn, Elizabeth Catlett, Wifredo Lam, and Santu Mofokeng.

Contemporary artists added in June include Charles White, Daniel Lind-Ramos, Guadalupe Maravilla, Ibrahim Mahama, Kapwani Kiwanga, Senga Nengudi, Simone Leigh, Sônia Gomes, and Will Rawls. The exhibition will also now include deceased outsider artists like Arthur Bispo do Rosário and Judith Scott, historical ones like José Guadalupe Posada and Juan van der Hamen y León, and late Chicana scholar and poet Gloria Anzaldúa.

This edition of the Bienal, the curators said in a statement in April, “wants to build spaces and times of perception that challenge the rigidity of western time linearity. What we see in this choreographic horizon are the strategies and policies of the movement that these practices have been creating in order to imagine worlds that confront the ideas of freedom, justice and equality as impossible achievements.”

The complete artist list follows below. Names with asterisks were announced in the initial artist list.