São Paulo Bienal announces artist list, including Frank Bowling and Precious Okoyomon.

The Fundação Bienal de São Paulo has released the full list of artists participating in the 36th São Paulo Bienal, which opens September 6th and runs through January 11, 2026. Titled “Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice,” the exhibition will feature 120 participants, including Dominican artist Firelei Báez, British painter Frank Bowling, Nigerian American artist Precious Okoyomon, and Chinese artist Song Dong. The Bienal will take place at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion located in São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park.

The 2025 edition is curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, director of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, alongside co-curators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Paula Souza, co-curator at large Keyna Eleison, and advisor Henriette Gallus. The team drew inspiration from Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo’s poem “Da calma e do silêncio,” inviting reflection on migration and humanity.

“Bird migration patterns” inspired the curators’ approach to selecting artists for the Bienal, according to the press release. Birds’ migratory routes—like the red-tailed hawk’s flight between the Americas, the ruff’s movements between Central Asia and North Africa, and the Arctic tern’s transpolar journey—guided the way the curators found artists to include in the exhibition.

“This methodological process helped us avoid classifications based on nation-states and borders,” Ndikung explained. “By studying birds’ navigation skills, their impulse to migrate across land and water, their survival instincts, their expanded sense of space and time, and their urgency and agency, we were able to engage with artistic practices in different geographic regions while reflecting on the meaning of bringing humanity together in the context of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo.”

The biennial will feature a slate of international artists, with prominent names like Japanese Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura, Moroccan painter Mohamed Melehi, and Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Still, a large number of participants represent Brazil’s art community. Among the local artists are established names, such as Alberto Pitta and the late Heitor dos Prazeres, shown alongside emerging artists like Aislan Pankararu and Nádia Taquary.

The exhibition layout and design, by architects Gisele de Paula and Tiago Guimarães, is inspired by river estuaries. The space is conceived as a “sensory journey” with sinuous paths, organic forms, and fluid margins that invite pauses and encounters. “Like travellers, it does not repeat the path, but reinvents itself in a continuous rite of transformation and presence,” the architects said in a joint statement.

The full list of artists can be found here.