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The 10-Year Anniversary of the Bombay Beach Biennale
A reckoning, a carnival, a resurrection.
In 2026, the Bombay Beach Biennale turns ten—a decade of art, chaos, and minor miracles staged on the banks of a poisoned sea. The Salton Sea, our reluctant muse, still refuses to die. So do we, and our rituals of debauchery. During our tenure, the Biennale has transformed a forgotten desert town into one of the most improbable cultural experiments — a free, open, and participatory celebration of art, conspiracy, and imagination.
Year X brings its theme: THE LAST JUDGEMENT. The desert is tired of waiting for God… so we’re throwing our own apocalypse. Not the Biblical one—unless that’s how you roll. No pearly gates, no winged accountants. Just the artists, the sinners, the bureaucrats, and the bewildered, gathered to decide what was worth it after all.
Think of it as the trial of civilization, held in a decaying resort town - where the jury is drunk, the angels have questionable taste, the dead are certainly rising from their graves, and everyone’s guilty of something. At the Bombay Beach Biennale, salvation is dirty, dusty, and DIY. Redemption is performance art, and the line between sinner and saint is as blurry as the way the Sea’s horizon merges with the sunset.
The Salton Sea is our sacrament: that shimmering accident, that inland mistake, that mirror where humanity sees its reflection and laughs nervously. As we enter our second decade, we find ourselves at the mercy of a world facing its own final verdict. Our Last Judgement is a response to that collective reckoning. It asks:
How do we confess when the church has become a circus?
How do we ask forgiveness from the ruins we keep redecorating?
What comes after the end of the world — repentance, rebirth, or a bacchanal?
What better place to host the final reckoning than a landscape already post-hope, post-irony, and somehow still sublime… the place we pine for because it’s a world of our own making. After ten years, we’ve learned that collapse is a form of choreography. And that even the end of the world deserves a great flair of aesthetics.
The Bombay Beach Biennale
2026 Year X: The Last Judgement
Free and open to the damned, the divine, and everyone in between.
Participation is mandatory. Forgiveness is optional.
When you walk into the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican in Rome, the hundreds of tourists who have been shuffling, slowly and noisily, through the endless corridors of the Vatican, shut their mouths, put their phones down, and crane their necks to the ceiling to behold God’s arm outstretched to Adam, painted in the center of the Pope’s office, and one of the most famous images in the history of Western civilization.But you’d do best to avoid the cliché, and turn towards the back wall of the Chapel, where the real masterpiece stares you down: The Last Judgement, an epic fresco depicting the second coming as the dead rise from their graves to receive their final verdict.
A biblical story, to be sure, but also: a signifier with no signified, a morality made of fiction, a fresco that took four years to paint and includes Michelangelo’s self-portrait as flayed flesh and a caricature of one of his critics re-imagined as a demon. Even history’s storied favorites have easter eggs hidden inside of them, layers of meaning and context, and counter-narratives that make you crack a laugh.