Curated by Nora N. Khan and Andrea Bellini, the 18th edition of the Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement 2024 (BIM'24), produced and hosted by the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève from January 24 to May 16, 2024, is titled
A Cosmic Movie Camera. This title draws inspiration from the discovery by astrophysicists of a ring of photons around a black hole, which potentially represents the visible medium through which humanity could deepen its understanding of the interior of black holes—the epitome of the unknown.
The exhibition presented works, specifically commissioned for the occasion, by Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, alfatih, American Artist, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Sheila Chiamaka Chukwulozie,
Formafantasma, Aziz Hazara, Interspecifics, Lawrence Lek, Shuang Li,
Diego Marcon, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Sahej Rahal,
Jenna Sutela, Emmanuel Van der Auwera, and an exhibition display conceived by Giacomo Castagnola. The works on show explore the concepts of the invisible and the unknown, as expressed through aesthetics, the use of technology, and a wide variety of sensibilities.
The catalogue documenting the exhibition was conceived as a "binder" of the future, as indicated by the holes that run through the publication, from front to back. The book collects various types of texts relating to the artists participating in the Biennale—reviews, essays, interviews, poems, emails, and texts written for the occasion—with a view to creating a paper archive that may preserve the memory of the project in a dystopian future: inside a spaceship or in the building of the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, transformed in the distant future.
The visual essay that projects the works into a virtual context was designed by EPOCH, who also created the website hosting the ongoing virtual exhibition (bim24.ch). The catalogue's combination of print and digital formats, the real and the virtual, the past and the future, conveys the conceptual core of the Biennale, which explores the inextricable intertwining of AI, digital culture, and art in the contemporary world.
