What happens when we stop believing in photographs? For BIP 2026, four young curators have been invited to explore how manipulated and generated images shape our understanding of reality. Working across four interconnected spaces, their projects approach the question from different perspectives, inviting visitors to consider how images can become vehicles for disinformation.
This project was developed on the initiative of the German Embassy, the French Embassy, the Goethe-Institut Brussels, the Alliance Française de Bruxelles-Europe and the Institut français, with the support of the Franco-German Cultural Fund.
Silas Edwards
Wondrous Sightings
with Weronika Gęsicka, Edith Morris and Henry Turner
From the Loch Ness Monster to Bigfoot, extraordinary creatures, or “cryptids”, have long put the truth claims of photography to the test. Today, as AI-generated animal encounters flood social media and synthetic species infiltrate scientific databases, the cultural logic of the cryptid is returning in new forms.
The three artists in Wondrous Sightings examine how such images become believable, and what they reveal about our fears, desires and projections onto the natural world. Weronika Gęsicka transforms encyclopaedia entries about fictitious animals into eerily realistic AI images. Edith Morris, in her short film TROLSK, revives the techniques of early photographic hoaxes to resurrect folkloric creatures and re-enchant the landscape. Finally, Henry Turner paints a famous blurred photo purporting to show an extinct moa, probing the role of photography in nostalgia and myth-making.
Four other influential cryptid images are presented in insect cases, with labels recording the curator’s own encounters with misleading images. Between recycled furniture from the Chiroux library, the exhibition probes the growing vulnerability of systems that collect, classify and verify visual evidence.
Silas Edwards (Wales, 1999) is a curator and PhD researcher in visual history at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Giessen. He holds a Master’s degree in Curatorial Studies from Städelschule and Goethe University, and a BA in European Social and Political Studies from University College London. His curatorial practice spans historical and natural history exhibitions, contemporary art, and experimental approaches to museum texts.
Fanny Testas
Breeding Absences
with Gwenola Wagon, Philippe Braquenier and Marie Quéau; exhibition design by Shift Entity.
Taking as its starting point *Élevage de poussière* (Breeding Dust), a photograph taken by Man Ray in 1920 of Marcel Duchamp’s *Le Grand Verre*, Fanny Testas’s project, *Élevage d’absences* (Breeding Absences), explores what images can still teach us when their ability to represent wavers. To this end, the curator invites Gwenola Wagon, with her film *Chroniques du soleil noir*, in which the image reveals a presence constructed from what is no longer there: a vanished sun; and Philippe Braquenier, who draws on the visual codes of conspiracy theories to show that images are never valued for their appearance alone, but for the narratives that accompany them. Marie Quéau, for her part, photographs landscapes straddling the boundary between documentary and fiction, where time seems suspended, like the remnants of a world following a catastrophe that remains perpetually off-screen. These works explore images in which origin, context or certainty are lacking. Absence is not, however, viewed as a deficiency, but as a space open to interpretation, where narratives, beliefs and imaginations take shape. The artists demonstrate that images never convey truth on their own: their meaning depends on the narratives that accompany them and the perspectives that imbue them with meaning. The exhibition design, entrusted to the duo Shift Entity, extends this reflection by creating not so much a narrative path as an environment for the images. The exhibition thus invites visitors to embrace uncertainty and to ‘dwell in ambiguity’, rather than seeking to definitively separate truth from falsehood.
Fanny Testas (France, 1994) lives and works between Paris and Brussels. An independent curator, she studied at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis, followed by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Having worked in the art world for ten years, she collaborates with numerous artists and is involved in venues, events and cultural media in France and abroad. Alongside this, she develops projects aimed at passing on and sharing knowledge with a variety of audiences. In 2026, she is on a curatorial residency with Line Gigs at the Maison Populaire in Montreuil, where they are developing the exhibition series “Amitiés Amours Affinités”.
Thibaud Leplat
(a very deep) fatigue
with Morgane Baffier and Harold Lechien
In (a very deep) fatigue, Thibaud Leplat explores the image, not as documentary or informative, but as a structure of power. At a time when our relationship with reality is shaped by a continuous flow of visual content, we are entitled to ask: who organises this flow, who determines the conditions under which it appears, and who controls the tools used to produce images—particularly those generated by AI? And what effects does all this have on us? Drawing on the experience of a generation that has grown up with the internet, the project examines visual saturation, ‘scrolling’ and the physical and psychological consequences of this constant consumption of images. The works by Morgane Baffier and Harold Lechien draw on the codes of the internet, performativity and contemporary regimes of truth to cast doubt on the information and images that surround us. The exhibition creates a tension between accumulation, spectacle and exhaustion. Rather than offering solutions, (a very deep) fatigue turns doubt into a method and critical thinking into a tool for understanding who produces, organises and controls images — and thus the power relations at work within them.
Thibaud Leplat (France, 1997) is a French curator and writer based in Brussels. A graduate of the CARE Master’s programme at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, his work explores the intersections between artistic practices and research. From this perspective, he is interested in the interplay between exhibitions, public programmes, education and writing. He is currently an associate curator at Komplot (Brussels), where he helps to develop the artistic programme and coordinate the organisation.
Temitayo Olalekan
eye the threshold
featuring (subject to confirmation) Anna Safiatou Touré, Cihad Caner, Priyageetha Dia and a one-off screening of the 11.00 pm film *A Bunch of Questions with No Answers* by Alex Reynolds, starring Robert M Ochshorn
Faced with the erosion of trust in images and in the possibility of a shared reality, *eye the threshold* refrains from seeking a more stable truth or a restored authority of the image to counterbalance this crisis. The exhibition takes its starting point in the archive and conceives of it as an open, incomplete and constantly rewritten process, one that is constructed in the present. The reactivation and recontextualisation of traces of the past become a method for questioning the narratives of propaganda and disinformation, produced by constant repetition. The works of Anna Safiatou Touré, Cihad Caner, Priyageetha Dia, Räf & Clö, Alex Reynolds and Robert M. Ochshorn thus engage with fragments, omissions, ghosts and incomplete narratives that are shifted and sometimes challenged in order to bring other stories to the fore. This approach regards the gaps in the archive not as flaws, but as spaces for reinterpretation and political intervention.
Temitayo Olalekan (Nigeria, 1994) is a curator based in Marseille. He holds two master’s degrees from the University of Aix-Marseille (France) and the École des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, as well as a diploma in curatorial studies from KASK&Conservatorium (Belgium). His research, entitled *Curating the Inhuman*, examines how artistic and social practices interact with and challenge dominant constructions of ‘the human’ and ‘the inhuman’. She regards these constructs as the result of a historical process linked to coloniality, ecological extraction and regimes of knowledge, which continue to shape contemporary life and its inequalities.
On 2 December 2026, the curators will be invited to discuss the imaginaries produced by generative artificial intelligence, their political, ecological and aesthetic implications, as well as our contemporary relationship with images, disinformation and alternative realities. In the presence of the French Ambassador to Belgium and the German Ambassador to Belgium.
On the same day, Temitayo Olalekan will present a screening of the film *A Bunch of Questions with No Answers* by Alex Reynolds, featuring Robert M Ochshorn (2025, HD video, 23 hours 10 minutes), from 11.00 am until 10.00 am the following day (times to be confirmed).