What do pirates and Buddhists have in common? As historical or symbolic figures, they can represent the dialectics of disruption and order, blindness and sight, processes of searching and finding, and the struggle between individual sovereignty versus the disciplinary regimes of nation-states. This conjunction of intellectual currents undergirded the Busan Biennale 2024, “Seeing in the Dark,” which was co-curated by artistic directors Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte, and staged in the major port city of a country with a long history of diverse religious beliefs and clashing political ideologies. Gathering works by more than 70 artists from 36 countries, Mey and Pirotte explored concepts of opacity and revelation, spiritual pursuit and social activism, histories of maritime migration and trade, and narratives of alternative (often anarchist) communities—pirates among them—that predated European modernity.