The Swiss Moving Image Award

The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève inaugurates a prize supporting video creation by young artists in Switzerland.

The annual prize of 10,000 Swiss francs recognizes an outstanding young Swiss artist or artist working in Switzerland in the area of video art and moving images. The first award of its kind to be given by an art institution, it builds on the momentum of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, founded in Geneva in 1985, which has been hosted and organized by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève since 2009.

The prize is connected to an ambitious new digital platform launched by the Centre in November 2018. Each summer the Centre will entrust a young curator with making a rolling selection of recent video works created in Switzerland. The venue is the 5th floor, a digital platform that extends the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève into virtual space (attracting an average of 20,000 visits per month). By adding three new works every month, a full 12 months of programming ultimately offers a unique panorama of the Swiss video art scene in all its diversity. The cycle culminates in the Swiss Moving Image Award, which gives special recognition to one of the artists in the pool.

Conceived to significantly encourage the production of moving image works and ensure a wider distribution for new works, the prize showcases the quality and dynamism of Swiss audiovisual artistic production for a national as well as international audience. Supporting the work of young Swiss artists or artists active in Switzerland with production and distribution, the award functions as a grant for producing a new project—to be premiered, in turn, at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève.

The 2020–21 selection was entrusted to Mohamed Almusibli, artist and curator deeply connected to Switzerland’s emerging art scene. His Almusibli Panorama has been unfolding since July 2020 and will run through June 2021. Almusibli’s flexible approach has consistently remained open to concerns and trends that continually emerge throughout the world. All of the works shown thus far in Almusibli Panorama can be viewed on the 5th floor (in the section entitled Works).

Serving on the international jury for the 2021 Swiss Moving Image Award are Andrea Bellini (Director, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève), Haro Cumbusyan (art collector), Olamiju Fajemisin (writer), Andrea Lissoni (Director, Haus der Kunst in Munich), Lisa Long (Curator, Julia Stoschek Collection in Berlin and Düsseldorf) and Deborah Joyce Holman (artist, curator, and Associate Director of Auto Italia South East in London). The winner will be announced in the summer of 2021.

BIM 2021
When it was established in the 1980s, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement was one of the very first events of its kind. Since 2014, under the direction of Andrea Bellini, it has exclusively presented works commissioned and produced by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. This new life as a full-fledged production platform is something that distinguishes the BIM from the usual succession of contemporary art biennials. Every two years, this hybrid event—situated at the crossroads of film festival, performance space, series of solo shows, and research and production platform—brings together some of the world’s most adventurous visual artists, performers, musicians, and filmmakers.

The next edition, co-curated by DIS (the New York based collective) and Andrea Bellini, will be held from November 11, 2021 through January 30, 2022. Participating artists will be announced soon.