The Spirits of Maritime Crossing 2026, Collateral Event of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfù, Venice, 9 May 2026 – 2 August 2026
The Bangkok Art Biennale Foundation presents the Collateral Event The Spirits of Maritime Crossing 2026, an international group exhibition curated by Prof. Dr. Apinan Poshyananda, Chief Executive and Artistic Director of Bangkok Art Biennale. Supported by Thai Beverage Public Company Limited (ThaiBev) and One Bangkok, the exhibition will be held from 9 May to 2 August 2026 at Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfù, Venice.
Bringing together 20 artists from Southeast Asia, as well as artists from Ireland, Serbia, and beyond, the exhibition explores themes of identity, displacement, diaspora, memory, and spiritual resilience in a world shaped by migration and global transformation. Spanning performance, film, installation, painting, and sculpture, the exhibition reflects on how artists transform shared experiences of loss, rupture, and transition into poetic forms of connection. Highlights include new collaborative works and a short film created especially for the exhibition, directed by Prof. Dr. Apinan Poshyananda.
Prof. Dr. Apinan Poshyananda, Curator, explains: “I am deeply honoured that The Spirits of Maritime Crossing 2026 returns to Venice as one of the Collateral Events of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. In this edition, 20 artists from Southeast Asia, Serbia, and Ireland examine cultural flows through migration, diaspora, and dislocation as a result of colonization, war, and environmental detriment. The hum in minor keys of the voiceless from distant places are brought to Venice. Shifting a slower gear with meditative deep breaths, viewers experience through film, performance, sound, painting, and installation multiple interpretations of spirits of maritime crossing.”
At the heart of the presentation is Marina Abramović’s performance Sea Punishing, staged with hundreds of participants whipping the sea in reference to King Xerxes’s act of punishing destructive waters—a poignant remembrance of the Andaman Sea tsunami. The new film The Spirits of Maritime Crossing Part II follows Abramović alongside Pichet Klunchun, Mutmee Pimdao Panichsamai, Aleksandar Timotić, and Amanda Coogan on a spiritual journey between Venice and Bangkok, tracing themes of suffering, solitude and transcendence.
Marina Abramović shares: “I am delighted to participate in The Spirits of Maritime Crossing 2026 on the theme of spiritual journey through maritime crossing that explores painful journeys of colonization, diaspora, migration and slavery. As I performed in the film with choreographer Pichet Klunchun in temples and many sites in Bangkok the experience was most challenging and contemplative. Additionally, my videowork Sea Punishing (2005) inspired by the tsunami that destroyed thousands of lives on the Andaman Seas will be shown with works related to trauma and dislocation by emerging artists from Southeast Asia.”
Ong Kian Peng notes: “In my work, I examine how water acts as an oscillating force between present realities and possible futures shaped by rising seas and engineered resilience. This movement between the known and what is imagined echoes the exhibition’s inquiries into journeys, memory, and the porous connections between places—how coastlines shift, how histories traverse oceans, and how bodies navigate uncertain horizons. The shared vulnerabilities of Singapore and Venice show how island cities live in a constant state of ecological anxiety, suspended between adaptation and fragility.”
A major theme throughout the exhibition is the navigation of personal mythologies and collective memories: Martha Atienza’s underwater film merges Catholic rituals with maritime processions; Ong Kian Peng envisions Singapore submerged by rising currents through disruptive AI imagery; Tcheu Siong stitches Hmong cosmologies into monumental embroideries; and Sornchai Phongsa’s paintings confront Mon ancestral rituals and queer identity. Across the exhibition, artists reflect on migration, spirituality, environmental fragility and cultural inheritance: from Nadiah Bamadhaj’s reinterpretation of Calon Arang to Le Hien Minh’s paper sculptures of post-war memories, Soe Yu Nwe’s surreal ceramics of hybrid creatures, and Parada Wiratsawee’s haunting sculptures of sea life in distress.
Themes of ecological collapse and ancestral resilience reverberate throughout The Spirits of Maritime Crossing 2026, with Ruangsak Anuwatwimon’s fragile floating soil diorama and Wasinburee Supanichvoraparch’s ceramic residues of ancient trade routes, while Torlarp Larpjaroen’s Spiritual Spaceships evoke nostalgic vessels arriving in Venice. Arahmaiani’s participatory Flag Project and Yasmin Jaidin’s soil-based works engage communities and universities in sustainable artmaking. Contrastingly, in Ode to Joy – Thai Sign Language (2024), Amanda Coogan performed the piece in collaboration with Thai youths with hearing disabilities, where they participated in the silent choir at the concert led by Coogan at the historic white stupa at Prayurawongsawat Temple in Thonburi, offering a breath of hope. Through layered narratives of faith, race, migration and neo-colonial realities, The Spirits of Maritime Crossing 2026 reflects on a world in flux, offering moments of quiet resistance and poetic resilience.
