PUBLICATIONS
The Wrong: a biennale where error becomes a method
Julia Sysalova on the significance of this kind of biennial within today’s art ecosystem
The Wrong Biennale is a global initiative dedicated to the creation and dissemination of digital art and culture. The New York Times has described it as the digital counterpart to the Venice Biennale. Founded in two thousand thirteen, it has brought together more than twelve thousand artists and curators, presented across hundreds of pavilions, “embassies,” and institutional spaces around the world.
The Wrong Biennale is a global initiative dedicated to the creation and dissemination of digital art and culture. The New York Times has described it as the digital counterpart to the Venice Biennale. Founded in two thousand thirteen, it has brought together more than twelve thousand artists and curators, presented across hundreds of pavilions, “embassies,” and institutional spaces around the world.
The project has received an honorary mention from the European Commission’s S+T+ARTS initiative and was recently admitted to the International Biennial Association as an institutional member. For a platform that is anti-institutional by nature, this is a rare distinction—one that signals its substantial impact on the evolution of contemporary art and digital culture worldwide.
However, The Wrong is deliberately not a biennial in the classical sense. And it is precisely this divergence from expectation that constitutes its core strength. From the outset, the project has positioned itself as an alternative not only to museum and art-fair logics, but also to the very idea of a centralized artistic statement.
With each new edition, The Wrong further reinforces its founding stance: a refusal of the center, of the vertical hierarchy of curatorial authority, and of any final, authoritative voice. Its “wrongness” is not aesthetic but structural. Error here functions not as a defect, but as a method for organizing the artistic field.
Founded by artist and curator David Quiles Guilló as an open online platform for practitioners operating outside institutional frameworks, The Wrong has, over the years, evolved from an experimental internet project into a distributed ecosystem. It brings together dozens of curators from diverse cultural and professional contexts, hundreds of artists, online and offline pavilions, websites, archives, browser-based environments, metaverses, and social networks.
This is not an exhibition in the conventional sense, but a fragmented, noisy, and internally contradictory field, lacking a single route or a unified point of view. In this respect, The Wrong does not so much represent digital art as it reproduces the very logic of digital visual culture itself—with its overload, volatility, and instability.
Digital art within The Wrong rarely aspires to formal purity or visual resolution. On the contrary, irony, glitch, memetic strategies, visual noise, and deliberate inelegance prevail. Beneath this apparent chaos lies a conscious break with the modernist ideal of the perfected object, in favor of process, error, and instability as both aesthetic and political categories.
Within this context, The Wrong can be read as a symptom of a post-platform condition of art, in which the artist simultaneously assumes the roles of author, user, mediator, archivist, and product of their own digital representation. The project captures a moment in which the artistic statement becomes one of the many forms of data circulation.
At The Wrong Biennale 2025, Julia Sysalova and JS Gallery presented the project Code Error.
(follow the link for further details about the project)
With each new edition, The Wrong further reinforces its founding stance: a refusal of the center, of the vertical hierarchy of curatorial authority, and of any final, authoritative voice. Its “wrongness” is not aesthetic but structural. Error here functions not as a defect, but as a method for organizing the artistic field.
Founded by artist and curator David Quiles Guilló as an open online platform for practitioners operating outside institutional frameworks, The Wrong has, over the years, evolved from an experimental internet project into a distributed ecosystem. It brings together dozens of curators from diverse cultural and professional contexts, hundreds of artists, online and offline pavilions, websites, archives, browser-based environments, metaverses, and social networks.
This is not an exhibition in the conventional sense, but a fragmented, noisy, and internally contradictory field, lacking a single route or a unified point of view. In this respect, The Wrong does not so much represent digital art as it reproduces the very logic of digital visual culture itself—with its overload, volatility, and instability.
Digital art within The Wrong rarely aspires to formal purity or visual resolution. On the contrary, irony, glitch, memetic strategies, visual noise, and deliberate inelegance prevail. Beneath this apparent chaos lies a conscious break with the modernist ideal of the perfected object, in favor of process, error, and instability as both aesthetic and political categories.
Within this context, The Wrong can be read as a symptom of a post-platform condition of art, in which the artist simultaneously assumes the roles of author, user, mediator, archivist, and product of their own digital representation. The project captures a moment in which the artistic statement becomes one of the many forms of data circulation.
At The Wrong Biennale 2025, Julia Sysalova and JS Gallery presented the project Code Error.
(follow the link for further details about the project)
Equally crucial is the radical democratic nature of participation. Strong conceptual projects coexist here with naïve, almost amateur gestures. From an institutional perspective, this may appear as a lack of curatorial rigor or a dilution of quality criteria. The Wrong consciously embraces this risk, proposing a different model of value: not the selection of “the best,” but the creation of a maximally representative cross-section.
At the same time, the project does not conceal the weaknesses of the digital art environment. Many works engage with themes of artificial intelligence, metaverses, identity, and posthumanism, yet often remain confined to the repetition of already established visual and theoretical clichés. This, too, is part of an honest snapshot: digital art today is, to a significant extent, indeed in a phase of overproduction of images and ideas. In this sense, the biennial functions as an archive of its time, with all its contradictions.
Ultimately, The Wrong poses a fundamental question: is a biennial possible without a center, without hierarchies, and without a final statement?
And if so, are we prepared to perceive art not as a system of authorities, but as an unstable flow of data, errors, and unfinished gestures?
The Wrong does not offer an answer in a familiar institutional form. Its value lies in its function as a test zone. Here, one can observe the emergence of a new visual language, in which art relinquishes its claim to permanence and accepts temporality and disappearance within the logic of a browser tab—understanding that such a mode of existence renders it simultaneously radically contemporary and radically vulnerable.
And perhaps this is precisely where the relevance of this “wrong” biennial lies: it captures the moment when instability itself becomes the only sustainable form of artistic expression.
Julia Sysalova,
curator, art critic