BOG25: A Biennial to See the City with New Eyes

The first International Art and City Biennial of Bogotá, BOG25, will take place from September 20 to November 9, 2025, in Bogotá, Colombia. Organized by the Mayor's Office of Bogotá and the District Secretariat of Culture, Recreation, and Sports, it will feature more than 100 national and international artists.

The first International Art and City Biennial, BOG25, aims to view Bogotá as a work of art in itself. Walking through the city amid increasingly overwhelming daily routines often causes its architecture to become invisible. The program begins in September and will run through November of this year.

Essays on Happiness: Art and Urban Well-being

Under the title Bogotá, Essays on Happiness, the event invites reflection on the link between the city and the pursuit of well-being. The concept reveals latent tensions between the need to enjoy and the imperative to be happy, addressed from a critical perspective. When happiness is turned into a quantifiable goal attainable through predetermined formulas, it risks being stripped of its deeper, more subjective dimension—reduced to yet another product of the self-help market.

Cities continue to expand, and the urban environment as a promise attracts migration based on expectations that ultimately lead to complex social stratifications. Rural and urban blend at the peripheries, and the margins gain prominence when what defines us is closely tied to the vernacular and popular culture of a country like Colombia. Bogotá is also a constantly expanding, ever-changing space where the population grows without limit, transforming the city into a multifaceted and vibrant place.
 

Six Curatorial Axes to Rethink Bogotá

The curatorial project delves into multiple possibilities of the concept: Enjoyment and Leisure focuses on collective action, carnival, and play; Ritual and Nature explores artificial paradises, altered states, and healing processes; Stratigraphies addresses segregation and endogamy in a city where the population is divided by strata; Cold Land centers on Bogotá as one of the few cold-climate cities in a tropical country and examines its ecosystem; The Promise addresses this expansive metropolis as a place of welcome and aspiration for a better life; and Toxic Positivity critically examines the rise of self-help literature and the business built around the pursuit of happiness.

Dialogues with Historical References

BOG25 will reactivate two important historical references from the late 1970s and early 1980s—artists Beatriz González (Colombia) and Alfredo Jaar (Chile)—who explored happiness critically, examining the tensions surrounding this notion in context.

The Environmental Axis, along Avenida Jiménez, will serve as the central site of the biennial: art will take over public space and various unconventional venues along just under a kilometer. There, works will engage with the fluvial and heritage history of downtown Bogotá in a dialogue between this historically charged avenue, the works of over 100 national and international visual artists, and the residents and visitors of Bogotá.

There will also be programming in various neighborhoods and districts of the city, including workshops, laboratories, and mediation spaces aimed at bringing art closer to new audiences, especially young people and vulnerable communities.

Among the international artists is Glenda León (Havana, 1976), whose work explores poetic connections between the visible and the invisible, blending art, nature, sound, and spirituality in deeply sensitive conceptual installations. Among the national artists are Adrián Gaitán (Cali, 1983), whose body of work questions symbols of Western high culture and its hegemonic imaginaries, and Johan Samboni (Cali, 1995), who maintains a critical practice that connects the body to processes of racialization and territoriality. All three artists, represented by La Cometa, will participate in the main curatorial line.

Curatorial and Institutional Direction

The BOG25 curatorial committee is composed of María Wills, Jaime Cerón, and Elkin Rubiano, with José Ignacio Roca as curatorial advisor. On the institutional support side, the biennial is backed by organizations such as Idartes, FUGA, Canal Capital, and the District Institute of Cultural Heritage. The event is organized by the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá in conjunction with the Secretariat of Culture, Recreation, and Sports. The general direction is led by Diego Garzón and Juan Ricardo Rincón, known for their work with La Feria del Millón. Their experience with alternative formats was key in envisioning a biennial that seeks to move beyond museums and connect directly with the public.

The event will also feature permanent urban interventions designed by Latin American architects, as well as sculptural tributes to healthcare workers affected by the pandemic. This blend of memory, art, and urban politics encapsulates the spirit of a biennial that aims to rethink the city through art, not just as infrastructure.

BOG25 is an invitation to see the city with new eyes. Through art, it seeks to highlight our ways of living together, questioning, and transforming shared space. In doing so, Bogotá joins the international biennial circuit with a unique, critical, and inclusive perspective.