Bog25 INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL OF ART

BOG25 is about to flip Bogotá inside out.

Picture it: dawn, September 20, 2025. You step onto Carrera Séptima expecting rush-hour chaos—and find a seven-story mural blooming across a glass tower while a brass quartet melts cumbia into the morning air. Turn the corner, and dancers shimmer between buses, their steps in sync with an invisible DJ. A hologram the size of a city bus whispers questions about joy. From that sunrise until November 7, the Bogotá International Biennial of Art and City—BOG25— turns the capital into a relentless experiment in happiness, spilling from polished galleries straight into the heartbeat of the street.

This isn’t art quarantined behind velvet ropes. Curators María Wills, Jaime Cerón, and Elkin Rubiano—guided by globe-roaming adviser José Ignacio Roca—have spent two years raiding studios on three continents for works that inhale city grit and exhale optimism. Their lone rule: make strangers talk. So installations sprout in bus terminals, video poems hijack digital billboards, and neighborhood parks become midnight theaters where anyone with a flashlight joins the cast. Entry? Always free.

Yet, the spectacle is only the spark. Pop-up workshops coax schoolkids to remix digital graffiti; rooftop debates pit street vendors against tech CEOs over what happiness really costs; late-night walking tours trace ghost rivers buried beneath asphalt, asking why some dreams get built while others drown. When you look up from your phone, you’ve crossed invisible borders—social, economic, even linguistic—and they’ve dissolved behind you.

BOG25’s gamble is audacious: if art can flood every crack in a city, it may also seal the cracks inside us. Picture Bogotá as a giant nervous system, lighting up wherever curiosity meets concrete. The Biennial supplies the electricity; you provide the spark.

And the world is watching. Journalists from Tokyo, critics from New York, and collectors from Lagos will prowl the same streets as taxi drivers and teenagers, all chasing rumors of a surprise gig or a sculpture that sings when it rains. Coffee shop chatter becomes global commentary; a selfie beneath a kinetic canopy could wind up on an art magazine cover.

Follow the unfolding story at qabienal25.com. The city you thought you knew is rewriting itself; don’t just watch—walk right into the following sentence.

Image Credit: bienalbogota.com