© SMITH

David de Beyter / BIP 2018 / BOVERIE

BIP 2018 / CHIROUX

SMITH / BIP 2018 / BOVERIE

2018

BIENNALE DE L'IMAGE POSSIBLE - BIP 2018

11th edition of the Biennale de l’Image Possible

 

8 exhibitions including FLUO NOIR at La Boverie / new and evolving artistic productions / a programme of events / creative public reception and mediation facilities / a catalogue.

In l’Image Possible, there is an opening to the future.

However, at the beginning of the 21st century, the hopes and utopias that we allow ourselves have changed radically. Faced with the observation of the phenomenal failure that puts us on the threshold of our own survival as a species, we have the choice between cynicism, despair or the invention of stories and images that renew, in their themes and forms, the fictions that will lead us elsewhere, without knowing where that elsewhere is?

Some of today’s artists claim disaster as a euphoric and overflowing breeding ground. They destroy and build in the same movement. Without naivety but anchored in the present, they build up images that speak of tomorrow, throwing themselves into it without knowing what it will be made of. Often in profusion, often animated by a spirit of playful and generous experimentation, tied to contemporary melancholy without being victims, these images no longer denounce, resist or sue. Rather, they bear witness to a living moment, a state of vibration, an intense present that opens up both to doubt and to the potential of the future.

In this freedom, in these joyful apocalypses, there is an echo of Nietzsche’s amor fati, this cry “to love what happens, to accept one’s destiny”, in pain and happiness, and a frank invitation to share this circulating heat that we call sympathy: the attraction for what we do not yet know, the mysterious effect of one body on another.

For its 11th edition, BIP2018 would like to transmit an energy. To share a radiant, mutant, intense vitality; an exuberant, lucid, uncomplexed movement; a presence and a present.

The Biennial of the Possible Image is …

Created in 1997, the event that would quickly become the International Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts of Liege turns into BIP in 2010 to become, on the occasion of its 10th edition in 2016, the Biennial of the Possible Image. This change of name, where the direct reference to photography disappears, is part of a fundamental movement that has gradually changed the appearance of the Biennial since its creation.

Like many photo festivals that were created at the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s, the Liège Biennial is from the outset interested in emerging forms. The Biennial presents artists who bear witness to the evolution, or even upheavals, that have occurred in photographic practices over the last twenty years or so. In the heterogeneity of its forms and positions, in its multiple uses and practices, in its confrontation with other types of images, photography is undergoing profound changes in contact with social transformations and its inclusion in the practices of contemporary creation.

Since BIP2016, the Biennial of the Possible Image has taken note, no longer strictly of the movements of photography when it reaches its limits, but, more broadly, of the regimes of circulation of the contemporary image, which happily crosses, in ever more flexible and hybrid forms and aspects, the intimate, media, political, economic, sociological and anthropological fields.

The Biennial of the Possible Image is today an event that defends the artists who account for these crossings and porosities. BIP presents a combination of photographs, videos and visual art installations. Through its artistic selection, BIP questions contemporary images and the relationships we have with them.

 

 

www.bip2018

BIP 2018 / Installation Views