The 14th edition of the Taipei Biennial, Whispers on the Horizon, is set to open on November 1 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, the exhibition brings together 52 artists from 35 cities worldwide, featuring 33 commissioned works and site-specific installations.The exhibition explores the notion of yearning — not as nostalgia, but as a vital tension between the real and the desired. Today, yearning takes on a new urgency as it becomes a collective pursuit for justice, recognition, and belonging in the face of erasure.This sense of urgency echoes through three artifacts that inspired the biennial: the puppet from Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s film “The Puppetmaster” (1993), the diary from Chen Yingzhen’s short story “My Little Brother Kangxiong” (1960), and the bicycle from Wu Ming-Yi’s novel “The Stolen Bicycle” (2015). Each object aims to embody both loss and desire, reminding us that yearning is lived — not abstract.Whispers on the Horizon gathers works that embody yearning in strikingly different ways, from film and performance to sculpture and immersive environments. Highlights include the following new commissions:Korakrit Arunanondchai’s installation Love after Death merges recollections and myth into a ghostly ritual: On a transparent projection, spirits and monkeys said to channel the dead flicker into view, asking how grief can turn ash into gold. Omar Mismar’s “Still My Eyes Water” presents a monumental bouquet of artificial flowers inspired by “Flowers of Palestine” (1870). Perfect yet scentless, they reflect on Palestine as both a land of life and a fading memory. Zih-Yan Ciou reconstructs a colonial decoy airfield in “Fake Airfield” with a handmade Zero fighter and fictional film, exposing history as invention and exploring Taiwanese identity. The exhibition also features the following immersive and participatory site-specific installations:Álvaro Urbano’s “TABLEAU VIVANT (A Stolen Sun)” is a silent theater where objects glow like apparitions under shifting light, intertwined with works from the TFAM collection, blurring museum and stage, history and role-play. Fatma Abdulhadi builds a fragrant garden of basil and printed mesh in “What Remains… Stay as Long as You Can”, preserving fading rituals of care and reminiscence where scent and silence become vessels of belonging. Gaëlle Choisne’s Fortune Cookies is an installation of thousands of handmade clay fortune cookies, each containing a seed or secret, evoking hidden labor and misattributed cultural histories. Curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath said: “Everywhere we look, there is a longing for clarity in the face of disinformation, for belonging in fractured communities, and for connection in a time of divisiveness. The works in the biennial don’t resolve these tensions — rather, they seek to make them tangible. That is the promise of this biennial: to experience yearning not as something abstract or historical, but as something alive, urgent, and shared in the present.”In addition to Jacopo Benassi’s live performance on the opening weekend, November 1–2, 2025, the biennial will host a two-day forum with six panels, delving deeper into themes of yearning, belonging, dissonance, history, seeing, and collaboration. The event will feature conversations and contributions from nearly 30 acclaimed artists and thinkers, including Taiwanese writer and scholar Wu Ming-Yi, multimedia and installation artist Mona Hatoum, multidisciplinary artist and sculptor Ivana Bašić, and filmmaker Wu Chia-Yun. Building on the exhibition’s presentation, these sessions are intended to spark discussions and exchanges on art’s ability to probe deeply, challenge assumptions, and open new possibilities.For more information, visit taipeibiennial.org/2025.Follow TFAM on Facebook and Instagram.