Ekow Eshun Names 40-Plus Artists for 2027 Site Santa Fe Biennial

The 13th Site Santa Fe International, titled There Are Other Worlds, will run 11 June 2027 to 10 January 2028 across more than six venues, curator Ekow Eshun has announced, with more than 40 artists from over 15 countries.

The lineup mixes local and international names. New commissions are due from the US artists Cauleen Smith, Sanford Biggers and Edgar Arceneaux, the New Mexico-based Diné artist Raven Chacon, and the Canadian artist Lotus Kang. Nearly half the participating artists are American, including Arthur Jafa and Nan Goldin. Five, among them the Indigenous artists Rose B. Simpson and Cannupa Hanska Luger, are based in New Mexico.

The international contingent includes Louise Giovanelli (UK), John Akomfrah (Ghana/UK), Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (Chile), Shilpa Gupta (India), Tavares Strachan (Bahamas), Olafur Eliasson (Danish-Icelandic) and Delcy Morelos (Colombia).

Who is the curator?

Eshun chairs the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group in London's Trafalgar Square and curates British Art Show 10: A Chorus of Strangers, which tours the UK until June 2028. Site Santa Fe, founded in 1995, remains one of the US's key contemporary art events, pairing international artists with New Mexico's history and social fabric.

Eshun is drawing directly on that regional inheritance. "New Mexico has a layered history, including colonial settlements, but also in the 20th century it had artistic communities that found something here that allowed them to think with expansiveness," he told The Art Newspaper. "It is the site of settlement, world-making and self-discovery."

How is the exhibition structured?

The biennial splits into three sections the curator describes as "interlocking territories":

• Worlds Beyond examines sensory and psychological perception, drawing on the legacy of the Transcendental Painting Group, active in New Mexico in the 1930s and 40s. Eshun cites Eliasson, who "thinks with scientific precision while creating works that have both sensorial and emotional impacts".

• Worlds in Common uses New Mexico's history of utopian settlements to explore "how artworks may enable us to move beyond hierarchies of power or status and conjure connection or kinship". Chacon's work, which uncovers histories of displacement in the Americas while turning to connection and memory, anchors the section.

• Worlds Alive focuses on interactions with nature, framing "the planet as a living territory where all the creatures may have a say in how we live collectively". Morelos, who treats the earth as a physical and ethical territory, serves as Eshun's example.

What does this change for a biennial audience?

Eshun frames the show against a fractured backdrop. "We live in a time of divisiveness, uncertainty, inequality and environmental crisis," he said. "I am inspired by how, in contrast, artists hold complexity and contradictions, inviting us to look beyond binary positions and consider other ways of seeing the world."

Those worlds, he clarifies, may be imaginative, psychological, emotional and sensory — a broad mandate that leaves plenty of room for interpretive latitude.

He insists the biennial "exists in conversation, not isolation", and community programming will be central rather than peripheral. Still, he tempers expectations for what art can deliver: artists, he says, "offer no answers but may open new ways to see, imagine and engage with the present".

That is the wager for summer 2027 — a biennial that promises connection amid crisis, with no answers guaranteed.