The Bombay Beach Biennale along Southern California’s Salton Sea is an insurgent arts festival and ongoing ecological discourse.
Everyone warned me not to go alone.
“Bombay Beach is basically a ghost town,” Palm Springs–based artist Tyler Burton told me back in December.
“I have a really weird history there. I’m never going back,” a friend said when I asked him if he’d ever been to the Salton Sea. A few other film industry folks I know had been there for shoots.
One of them agreed to join me on the 150-some-mile drive from Los Angeles to the desert. “We’re near Salvation Mountain,” she said, looking at Google Maps. “But we shouldn’t go there. I got stranded last time.”
It isn’t clear where we should go once we get to Bombay Beach. This town, once a vacation destination on the southern edge of the Salton Sea—California’s largest (and accidental) lake—is easy to miss from the highway. Today, it’s just a small grid of modest homes and RVs, makeshift art galleries, and community spaces. We find one bar, the Ski Inn. Its walls and ceilings are papered with one-dollar bills. We wait in line for fries we never get.
We decide to walk to the water. This is supposed to be the final weekend of the Bombay Beach Biennale season, when three days of performances, talks, readings, screenings, and ad hoc gatherings take place. The artist Kenny Scharf has been here before—I see a trailer with one of his signature, spray-painted cartoons—but that’s where recognition ends for me. The town is surprisingly empty; we only pass one other group as we cross it. I learn we missed the second year of the Bombay Beach Lit Fest by one day.
There is detritus all along the shoreline: rebar stabbing the sand and sky; the remnants of warped trees. Some of the installations on the beach are clear art pieces. There is a sign at one end of the beach—“Showtown”—and a small circus tent stands some hundred yards away. Midabi’s The Only Other Thing is Nothing (2021) has traveled to multiple Burning Man festivals; it has stood outside the Palm Springs Art Museum. Now, at the Salton Sea, it’s accompanied by a newer steel sculpture, The Ocean Remains in Bombay (2023).
The “ocean” in this piece is a nod to the “great ocean,” as Midabi, who is known for his large-scale, text-based sculptures, explains it. It’s “the flow of matter and movement of space and time.”
The Biennale is perhaps best described as a collection of some of this matter—an interception. The Salton Sea, this microcosm of California’s ecological crises, is defined by decay. Agricultural runoff has turned the water to waste, destroyed habitats, and altered animals’ migration patterns. According to the California government, the sink is currently 227 feet below actual sea level. The state’s Parks and Recreation website says Bombay Beach is closed. The sea itself is shrinking rapidly, the shoreline receding dramatically each year. The Biennale isn’t really a singular showcase. It’s a prolonged elegy.
It takes us a while to notice the smell. “Sulfur?” I wonder aloud.
“That’s what I remember about this place,” my friend replies. “The smell of the sea.” The wind picks up, and she holds onto her suede hat.
More emerges as we walk. We are slow to distinguish anything on the beach as art, to orient ourselves to objects without any infrastructure governing our perception of it. There is a swing set over the water, with a painting of the same scene set in outer space propped nearby—two visions of the same place, a play of perception. The painting has the fantastical, glossy look of AI imagery. Some hundred yards away, a black wall mirror propped up with rocks begs us to pause: “60 seconds to appreciate yourself.” I step out of the frame and see the trailers and clouds behind me reflected back. Ahead, in the water, the metal spines of some kind of prehistoric fish rise above the waves.
“Do you know what’s going on?”
A man sitting on a log with his family—three kids under twelve, his wife, and maybe her father—looks up at us, tinfoil-wrapped sandwich in hand. “Is today one of the days things are happening?” The oldest kid has a set of watercolors out; I wonder if she is painting the beach, or imagining something else entirely. I laugh and shrug.
”I have no idea.”
Out of context, the vagueness of the man’s question seems absurd. But the Biennale notoriously operates by word-of-mouth—the organizers don’t share event dates or times for the finale weekend publicly. “Everything we do is open to anyone who can manage to find their way to Bombay Beach,” the Biennale’s website says. I only found out when the final celebration weekend was by joining a Patreon group.
“Well, you look like you know what’s going on,” the man assures me.
Here, you can’t tell who does or knows what, who makes the decisions. Everyone wanders, seemingly untethered from any of the usual social hierarchies. There are kids and thirty-somethings and older couples. I join a WhatsApp chat for updates on the day, but the messages are missives I can’t interpret: “Scooter tramp sausage shindig happening now across the street from the Blauhaus!”; “What’s called thinking in the age of AI? My friend Professor Iain Thompson’s talk about to begin in No Shoes.”
Heading back to our car, we find an archeological site with formal signage. The dig tells “The History of the Salton Civilization,” stamped with approval by the Universal Archaeological Association.
“Is this a real organization?” I ask, despite myself. For a moment, I’d forgotten where I was, and what I knew. But that’s the potency of the Bombay Beach Biennale. If you want to know, you have to ask.
“The Biennale is not a spectator sport,” the founders say. The only way to understand is to show up.
