In celebration of the opening of the 18^th edition of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, we will host four conversations on January 24^th and 25^th, with a select groups of artists who comprise the offering of BIM’24. Each artist has created an ambitious original work. Co-Curators Nora N. Khan and Andrea Bellini will lead discussions with the artists of BIM’24 to examine themes and process grounding each commission, their works’ rich overlaps, and their shared investigations of the core themes of BIM’24.

Wednesday January 24

12am-1pm – OPENING DIALOGUES I: Memory, History, Forgetting

We open the Artist Dialogues for A Cosmic Movie Camera with artists Jenna Sutela, Shuang Li, Lauren McCarthy, and Emmanuel van der Auwera. These four artists explore memory encoding, genetic legacy, entrainment, warfare and deep learning, neural radiance fields, and the suggestive power of a stock image, through their new films, ambitious video sculptures, and one ‘neuroactive installation’. We take a passage from Paul Ricoeur’s seminal Memory, History, Forgetting as a touchpoint for all four artists’ investigations.

Conversation moderated by Nora N. Khan & Andrea Bellini
With: Jenna Sutela, Lauren McCarthy, Shuang Li, and Emmanuel van der Auwera

2-3pm – OPENING DIALOGUES II: Limits of Mind

We close the first day of BIM’24 with a second Artist Dialogues with the artists Sheila Chukwulozie, Aziz Hazara, and Sahej Rahal. Chukwulozie and Rahal pursue highly original mythologies and world-building, in part around disintegrating limits, through their film and videogame, respectively. Hazara’s film grounds us ruthlessly in the limits of language and exile. . In considering these three artists’ commissions together, particularly within the context of technologies like ML, we find many of the narratives about the limits of the human mind and self that are limiting, which myth and narrative allows us to bend and move beyond. In Rahal’s Distributed Mind Test, the viewers – players – navigate a world, while practicing thinking as and with the non-human, and negotiating multiple mind-states (other players, avatars, beings). Woven throughout are texts from across history examining strict definitions of the human mind from before and long after early cybernetics. In Hazara’s Nowruz, a protagonist, in exile, begins to experience episodes of displacement and disorientation and flux. Chukwulozie’s 11:11 explores the major arcana, in which archteypes of self – the Fool, the Hero – create guiderails for experience.

Conversation between BIM’24 artists and Nora N. Khan
With: Sheila Chiamaka Chukwulozie, Aziz Hazara, and Sahej Rahal

Thursday January 25

4-5pm – OPENING DIALOGUES III: Future Broadcasts

Day Two of BIM’24 sees a dialogue with American Artist, Interspecifics, represented by Leslie Garcia and Paloma López, along with Lawrence Lek and Giacomo Castagnola. What will we be watching in the future? What speculative future broadcasts might captivate our attention? Lek’s new film, Empty Rider, has us looking at future watching, in an AI judge’s courtroom in which a self-driving car is on trial. Artist’s Yannis Window suggests a television whose access must be sold in the near future, as in Butler’s Parable of the Sower; we watch public access documentaries and characters in Butler’s novel as the subject of mock newscasts. Interspecifics’ Codex Virtualis_EMERGENCE 0.1 suggests another kind of future broadcast, or feed, a host of biological, speculative lifeforms, generating continually, unnamed and in a mesmerizing flow. Castagnola, an architect, created the scenography of BIM’24, including a central spine running from base to top floor that ‘broadcasts’ material – historical documents and ephemera and archives – which are gifts for the future, speak to the ethos of the artists, and celebrate 50 years of the Centre d’Art Contemporain.

Conversation moderated by Nora N. Khan
With: American Artist, Paloma Lopez and Leslie Garcia of Interspecifics, Lawrence Lek, and Giacomo Castagnola

5-6pm – OPENING DIALOGUES IV: Creating the Virtual Exhibition for BIM’24

Peter Wu, founder and creator of EPOCH gallery, creates virtual worlds that are artworks, using the potential of simulation to uncover, dive deep into, and illuminate aspects of practice and artworks that could not be easily accessed in a physical installation. For BIM’24, Peter created a wide-ranging, rigorous virtual exhibition for viewers who will never get to Geneva – or those who do, and will want to revisit works. Wu+ models the streets of Geneva and the Centre d’Art Contemporain in a sci-fi inflected future, using a series of interpretive lenses, moving far away from 1:1 replication to tweaking, expansion, and deepening of the context found in the physical exhibition. The virtual and digital are never secondary, but instead original, primary spaces, where the 15 artists of BIM’24 can be experienced altogether differently. We are able to slow down, and listen, and look at work more closely. Wu+ will discuss his process, his conversations with the BIM’24 artists, his consideration of the building’s architecture, and what he learned along the way, walking the audience through A Cosmic Movie Camera from a bird’s eye view.

Conversation moderated by Nora N. Khan
With: Peter Wu, EPOCH Gallery

6pm – Cocktail