9th Yokohama Triennale Key Visual. Design: Studio YUKIKO. Courtesy: Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale
On November 4, 2026, the Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale announced the exhibition title, concept, and key visual of the 9th Yokohama Triennale, which will open in April 2027 at the Yokohama Museum of Art. The exhibition, titled “Whalefall: News and Rumours from the Ocean Floor,” is directed by Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero.
Artistic directors Costinaș and Guerrero take two deep-sea biological phenomena, both alluded to in Japanese folk tales, as the exhibition’s point of departure: the oarfish, a deep-sea creature believed to foretell impending disasters when it rises to the surface, and the “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 oarfish is known in Japan as the messenger from Ryūgū, the dragon palace beneath the sea, while the whale fall moves the other way, as a dead whale sinks to the ocean floor and becomes the origin of an ecosystem that nourishes life for decades. “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,” per the press release.
Drawing inspiration from the Yokohama port as a site of exchange, connection, and deception, the Triennale follows the oarfish’s news and rumours through a series of episodes in the history of communication, from the Manila Galleon, the telegraph, and the panorama to today’s internet, social media, and AI. 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. (Click here for the full text of the exhibition concept)
For the 9th edition, the Yokohama Museum of Art is imagined as the body of a whale. Through an architectural intervention commissioned for this edition, the museum’s atrium becomes the whale’s 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.
9th Yokohama Triennale “Whalefall: News and Rumours from the Ocean Floor”
April 23–September 12, 2027
https://www.yokohamatriennale.jp/english
Venue: Yokohama Museum of Art
Artistic Directors: Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero