NEWS

The Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale（Kondo Seiichi, Chairperson / President, Yokohama Arts Foundation）is pleased to announce the exhibition title, concept, and the key visual of the 9th Yokohama Triennale to open on April 23, 2027.

9th Yokohama Triennale “Whalefall: News and Rumours from the Ocean Floor”

■ About the title: “Whalefall: News and Rumours from the Ocean Floor”
The exhibition takes two deep-sea biological phenomena, which are also alluded to in Japanese folk tales, as its point of departure: the oarfish, a deep-sea creature believed to foretell impending disasters when it rises to the surface, a messenger of news and rumours; and “whale fall,” in which the enormous bodies of whales that sink to the ocean floor nurture life and new ecosystems for many generations to come. The exhibition proposes to look at the contemporary world, which appears to be sinking under the weight of various crises, and to find signs of emerging life and futures amongst these narratives of ending.

■ Contemporary and Historical Infrastructures of Communication: A Triennale inspired by the Yokohama port
In the deep sea one also finds the networks of submarine cables sustaining internet connectivity across the oceans. This global network echoes the historical telegraph network of the previous era of globalisation, in which the Yokohama port was born, and even earlier periods of global exchanges that also involved Japan. Against the backdrop of these shifting global connections, the Artistic Directors, Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero, conceive this exhibition by drawing inspiration from the port as a site of exchange, connection, and deception.

■ Venue: Yokohama Museum of Art as the Body of a Whale
The Yokohama Triennale offers an open and welcoming introduction to contemporary art, inviting visitors to discover the diversity of our world and encounter the unknown. We warmly welcome everyone, including those who may be new to art and children who will shape our future. For the 9th edition, we imagine the museum as the body of a whale, welcoming visitors into its depths.

Exhibition Concept

The oarfish, a creature of the deep, is known in Japan as the messenger from Ryūgū, the dragon palace beneath the sea. When it rises to the surface, it has long been seen as announcing catastrophe. The whale fall moves the other way: a dead whale sinks to the ocean floor and becomes the origin of an ecosystem that nourishes life for decades, even longer. This downward movement, which sees death as beginning and ending as abundance, is the central metaphor of Whalefall: News and Rumours from the Ocean Floor.

Much of contemporary anxiety presumes the spectre of a monster that would eat humanity and the world. And yet what if humanity could devour this monster instead, and overcome these fears? To reverse the disaster narratives, we look down, to find hope in the dark and teeming depths, in a collective digestion.

The Triennale follows the oarfish’s news and rumours through a series of episodes in the history of communication, each also a laboratory of deception: the Manila Galleon, one crucial link in a worldwide intelligence network maintained by Catholic religious orders, an early cybernetic globalisation that spread the missionaries’ distorted accounts of the Nagasaki Christian executions; the telegraph and the panorama, the media of nationalism and empire, of false dispatches and imperial spectacle turned into collective reality; and today’s internet, social media, and AI, running on undersea cables colonised by marine organisms, with AI the ultimate deception, a digestion of the past that forecloses the new.

The Yokohama port, opened to the world on the cusp of the Meiji era, anchors the stories the Triennale traces, and through an architectural intervention commissioned for this edition, the Yokohama Museum of Art becomes the body of the whale, its atrium the thoracic cavity, or perhaps the hull of a large ship, in which artistic practices rooted in different genealogies gather and new worlds grow from the ocean floor.

Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero
Artistic Directors of the 9th Yokohama Triennale

Left：Inti Guerrero　Right：Cosmin Costinaș
Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans

9th Yokohama Triennale: Visual Concept

9th Yokohama Triennale
“Whalefall: News and Rumours from the Ocean Floor”