Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018: The Sound of Screens Imploding

5th Floor
The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève’s new digital platform

In anticipation of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is happy to launch the 5th Floor. Conceived as a new digital platform, the 5th Floor is a radio station, a digital production platform, and a new tool for artists’ voices and ideas.

On the website of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, the 5th Floor takes the form of a window, a virtual space that is fully autonomous and distinct from the exhibition programming. The 5th Floor is envisaged as a real experimental space for artistic content through new digital technologies. Through continuous renewal, this new digital production platform seeks to be a visual and sound creation laboratory at the cutting edge of new technologies and the latest art research.

Ian Cheng is the first artist invited to conceive a special project for this virtual space; it consists of a video animation presenting Emissary’s Guide to Worlding, Cheng’s pivotal contribution to the next Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (due to open on November 8).

Ian Cheng’s e-book Emissary’s Guide to Worlding is aimed at anyone interested in uniting the complexity of worlding with the finitude of human psychology. Reflecting on his experience making Emissaries (2015–17)—a trilogy of simulations about cognitive evolution and the ecological conditions shaping it—Cheng derives practical methods for making worlds using the whole brain. Through exercises designed to summon the artistic masks of the Director, the Cartoonist, the Hacker, and the Emissary, Cheng asserts worlding as a vital practice to help us navigate darkness, maintain agency, and appreciate the multitude of worlds we can choose to live in.

Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018
The Sound of Screens Imploding

The 2018 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, produced by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, explores the status of the moving image and its exhibition format, building on the idea that the era of projection onto 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 Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Andreas Angelidakis, Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic, Meriem Bennani, Ian Cheng, Tamara Henderson, Kahlil Joseph, and Fatima Al Qadiri & Khalid al Gharaballi, each with a work commissioned and produced for the occasion. Ligia Lewis will offer a preview of her new choreography—the final part of a trilogy—co-produced by the Biennale with the HAU theater in Berlin; musician Elysia Crampton will present a 500-square-meter installation and a live concert; 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 James Richards & Leslie Thornton. 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 premiere at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and other venues around Geneva during the opening week from November 8 to November 10, 2018.

The Biennale will be accompanied by a series of special events featuring Nkisi, 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 & Andrea Lissoni, Senior Curator, International Art (Film) at Tate Modern.