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Biennale

Founded in 1985 by André Iten, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (BIM) was initially called the “International Video Week” and was one of the first events of its kind in Europe. It has provided a platform for art and ideas by surveying the ever-shifting territories of moving images while aiming to make sense of this extraordinary profusion of images that has progressively invaded all aspects of contemporary art. Over a period of 30 years the BIM has brought together the very best in video art, showing works by artists such as Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Robert Filliou, Chris Marker, Guy Debord, Vito Acconci, William Wegman, Bruce Nauman, Chantal Akerman, Rebecca Horn, Jean-Luc Godard, Andy Warhol, Philippe Garrel, Nam June Paik, Laurie Anderson, Artavazd Pelechian, Harun Farocki, Matt Mullican, Anri Sala and the Straub/Huillet duo.

In 2009, the Centre inherited the former Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement founded and run by the Centre for Contemporary Image from 1985 until 2007. The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève then became one of the few institutions worldwide to organize a large-scale international contemporary art exhibition such as a biennial.

The Centre launched in 2014 a new event format, which considers its history, whilst looking to the future with a commitment to a young generation of artists. Comprising a wide array of multimedia installations, films and documentaries usually shown in cinemas, as well as performances, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement is a one of a kind hybrid situated somewhere between a cinema festival, a constellation of solo exhibitions and a site for research and production. The originality of the new BIM resides in the fact that it consists exclusively of works commissioned and produced for the occasion.


Biennale

Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement 2024

Each edition of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement adds to the curatorial and conceptual meta-discourse around the moving image, a ubiquitous medium that is ever in flux.

For this new chapter, writer, editor, and curator Nora N. Khan joins Andrea Bellini, director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, as co-curator to select the artists commissioned to produce original works due to premiere in Geneva in January 2024.

The artists of the 2024 edition are: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Alfatih, American Artist, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Sheila Chukwulozie, Formafantasma, Aziz Hazara, Interspecifics, Lawrence Lek, Shuang Li, Diego Marcon, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Sahej Rahal, Jenna Sutela, et Emmanuel Van der Auwera.

The Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2024 (BIM’24), titled A Cosmic Movie Camera, will expand on ever-evolving discourse on the moving image in all its forms, particularly in an algorithmic age. “A cosmic movie camera” is a reference to astrophysicists’ recent discovery of the photon ring around a black hole, the “infinite light trap” that may be the key visible way mankind can learn more about the still unknown: the inside of black holes. Each artist presents up a host of visual cues to the unseen, and the unknown, creating holographic figures, television shows running in Butlerian ruins, simulations that take on their own life, libraries of generative, new biological forms, AI courts, games of distributed, ancient intelligence, tragic dramas of artificial beings, labs of future genetic exchange, hallucinated cloud cities, endless projections, and on.

The opening of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2024 (BIM’24) marks the first event of an important year for the institution, as it celebrates its 50th anniversary. To mark the event, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève will propose an initiative around the notion of gift which is integrated as part of a tailored furniture and architectural project commissioned to Peruvian designer Giacomo Castagnola for BIM’24.


Biennale

Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement 2021

The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève announces the upcoming Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2021 (BIM'21), co-curated by the collaborative DIS and Centre’s director, Andrea Bellini. As one of the most interesting curatorial collectives active in the art world today, DIS has already produced exhibitions that have marked our era. BIM'21 will be no exception. This edition of BIM will be organized around the “artistic and cultural imaginary” of the New York collective and conceived as a radical “pilot season”—a collective effort to interrupt regular programming and find an exit from our human-centered, capitalist death drive.

At the invitation of project co-curator Andrea Bellini, DIS will present for the first time its own film, Everything But The World. Commissioned and produced by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève especially for BIM'21, Everything But The World is itself a pilot for a series on homo sapiens: a non-linear, natural history show about us. Everything But The World—like many of the other works in the exhibition—addresses the gulf between the complexity of humanity’s global existence and the smallness of our private lives. Along the way, it confronts our obsession with “the end of the world” while also acknowledging the arrogance of that word “the.”

The other artists in the exhibition, selected by DIS and Andrea Bellini, grapple similarly with a shift in consciousness and a need to debunk narratives. The Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement in Geneva is not built around a theme imposed by the curators. Rather, it bases its identity as a biennial on the principle of the production of new and entirely original works, for which the curators carefully select a small group of artists. The atmosphere of BIM'21 expresses a shared urge to imagine worlds that differ from the one we live in, and by a creative refusal of the status quo, including the current economic system. Each in their own way, the artists in this extraordinary group challenge the notion that this is the only possible world and the only possible economic system, a concept of history that has long suppressed political and cultural debate.

The other artists invited are Emily Allan & Leah Hennessey, Theo Anthony, Riccardo Benassi, Will Benedict & Steffen Jørgensen, Hannah Black & Juliana Huxtable & And Or Forever, DIS, Giulia Essyad, Simon Fujiwara, GRAU, Mandy Harris Williams, Camille Henrot, Sabrina Röthlisberger Belkacem, Akeem Smith and TELFAR.

One of the first events of its kind, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement was founded in 1985 in Geneva and was reinvented in 2014 as a platform for producing new works. Since then, it has made a significant contribution to enriching the audiovisual collections of the Canton and the City of Geneva, notably in the framework of the MIRE project.

The MIRE artistic journey, a leading project of the Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain, displays audiovisual works in the new stations of the Léman Express, with the aim of inscribing art within urban development. On the occasion of BIM '21, Giulia Essyad (Chêne-Bourg station) and Riccardo Benassi (Geneva-Champel station) will present their original works co-produced by the Centre and the Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain Genève.

The Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2021 is curated by DIS and Andrea Bellini, Director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève.

Cover image: Courtesy of Will Benedict and Steffen Jørgensen.

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Biennale

Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement 2018

The 2018 edition of the Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement will be transformed by an innovative project. At its center—alongside an extraordinary series of films, performances, and concerts—is an exhibition designed to form a single, vast, immersive environment. The concept for this show, which covers over 2,000 square meters, revolves around a fundamental principle: that moving images now live outside the screen, lingering on in a fascinating kaleidoscope where vision can be shaped even by sound.

Inevitably, this edition of the Biennale explores the status of the moving image and its exhibition format, building on the idea that the era of projection on screens is coming to an end, and will give way to environments that reverberate with the radiant echo of their implosion.

Emphasizing the innovative potential of new languages connected to the moving image, the 2018 Biennale forges a series of dialogues with a generation of artists from a wide range of countries and backgrounds.

The artists featured in the exhibition are Meriem Bennani, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Fatima Al Qadiri & Khalid Al Gharaballi, Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic, Ian Cheng, Tamara Henderson, and Kahlil Joseph, each with a work commissioned and produced by the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement. Andreas Angelidakis has been entrusted with tying all of these installations together into a single, cohesive project.Ligia Lewis will offer a preview of her new choreography—the final part of a trilogy—co-produced by the Biennale with the HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin; musician Elysia Crampton will present a new live work, and artist Pan Daijing will premiere a performance piece.

Nine films and single-channel videos, made for theatrical screening, have been commissioned from Sarah Abu Abdallah, Neïl Beloufa, Irene Dionisio, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Tobias Madison, Florent Meng, Bahar Noorizadeh, Eduardo Williams (with Mariano Blatt) and Leslie Thornton & James Richards. These films and videos, like all of the installations in the exhibition, have been commissioned and produced by the Biennale; together, they form an extraordinary series of new works that will be premiering at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and in other venues around Geneva during the opening week, from November 8 to 10, 2018.

The Biennale will be accompanied by a series of special events featuring the participation of Nkisi, John T. Gast, Abyss X, Crystallmess, and Angela Dimayuga.

The Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018 is curated by Andrea Bellini, Director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and Andrea Lissoni, Senior Curator, International Art (Film) at Tate Modern.

 See the website

Biennale

Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement 2016

Under the artistic direction of Andrea Bellini, in collaboration with Cecilia Alemani, Caroline Bourgeois and Elvira Dyangani Ose, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2016 will feature 27 new productions, which will be presented during an inaugural week between 9 and 13 November 2016. The exhibition will then remain open until 29 January 2017.

The 27 new projects produced for the BIM do not aim at surveying the moving image in a broad sense, but rather tries to create a dialogue around today’s world from an often feminine point of view. The Biennale will explore how artists depict today’s major themes of life and manage to make their work necessary and remarkable, through their strong engagement and their ability to raise awareness.

This edition of the Biennale makes spaces for differing and converging positions among a group of artists. For example Boychild, Wu Tsang, Emilie Jouvet, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz or Phoebe Boswell’s works question the notions of gender, the female figure and empowerment. While others, such as Salomé Lamas, Karimah Ashadu, Bertille Bak, Hicham Berrada and Bodil Furu investigate the exploitation of human and natural resources in various locations around the world. These projects, along with Yuri Ancarani’s documentary on the exuberant leisurely activities of the Qataris and the anthropological researches made by Trisha Baga, Tracey Rose, Cally Spooner and Kerry Tribe, underline the polarities of our world. Additional new works by Sophia Al Maria, John M. Armleder & Stephan Eicher, Brian Bress, Loulou Cherinet, Massimo D’Anolfi & Martina Parenti, Alessio Di Zio, Jenna Hasse, Evangelia Kranioti, Cinthia Marcelle & Tiago Mata Machado, Boris Mitic and Emily Wardill have also been commissioned and produced for the occasion.
The BIM 2016 encompasses a variety of artistic practices including video, sound, dance, performance, installation and even clubbing, broadening the scope of the moving image beyond the digital condition under which we often reductively see the world in 2016.

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Biennale

Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement 2014

In 2014 the Centre relaunched the Biennale of Moving Images (BIM) in close collaboration with the Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain (FMAC), the Fonds Cantonal d’Art Contemporain (FCAC), the HEAD – Geneva, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) (Tasmania, Australia), Arthub Asia (Shanghai, China), and the R4-Ile Seguin (Paris, France).
Under the artistic direction of Andrea Bellini (Director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève), Hans Ulrich Obrist (Curator and co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, London) and Yann Chateigné (Head of the Department of Visual Arts at the HEAD – Geneva), the BIM 2014 presents 22 new works produced and commissioned by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève.

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