The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is pleased to present the 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 presents 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 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.

Go to the BIM’21 website: bim21.ch

Cover image: Courtesy of Will Benedict and Steffen Jørgensen.