Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2021: A Love Letter, a Wake-Up Call, or a Goodbye Song

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. The biennial will be organized around the “artistic and cultural imaginary” of the DIS streaming platform dis.art, which will serve as the exhibition’s second venue. The curators have conceived this edition of BIM 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, No Homo. Commissioned and produced by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève especially for BIM 21, No Homo is itself a pilot for a series on homo sapiens: a non-linear, natural history show about us. No Homo—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 16 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 is characterized by a positive political drive, by 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 featured in the exhibition are Emily Allan & Leah Hennessey, Theo Anthony, Riccardo Benassi, Will Benedict & Steffen Jørgensen, Hannah Black & Juliana Huxtable, Mati Diop, DIS, Giulia Essyad, Simon Fujiwara, Mandy Harris Williams, Camille Henrot, Sabrina Röthlisberger, TELFAR and Leilah Weinraub.

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.

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