The ninth edition of the Biennale Images Vevey will be held from September 7 to 29. The theme of the 2024 poster, “(dis)connected”, offers visual experiences dealing with the gap created by digital technologies between past, present and future.
The most important visual arts biennial in Switzerland, the cultural event around photography remains faithful to its concept: custom-made photographic exhibitions and installations, both outdoors and indoors, to be discovered free of charge throughout the city of Vevey (VD) for three weeks, from September 7 to 29.
More than fifty artists from twenty-two different countries are invited this year. Ecology, geopolitics, economy, arts, education and leisure: all sectors of society are concerned by this revolution of new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI). The fifty or so projects presented “will create links between nostalgia for the past and curiosity about an uncertain future”, summarize the managers of the Biennale Images Vevey.
“The artistic proposals will play on the feeling of connection and disconnection between tangible reality and digital fantasy,” they explain. The public will therefore sometimes be confronted with doubt when faced with the images exhibited in order to determine, for example, the human or digital origin of a work.
Paul Graham brings passers-by from New York to Vevey
After a detour to New York last May, the series “Sightless” by British photographer Paul Graham, shot twenty years ago in Times Square, disconnects from the New York crowd and settles in the streets of Vevey. With this artistic installation, Images Vevey had in fact exported itself for a week to the Big Apple this spring in the middle of the giant advertising screens of the famous square.
With “Sightless”, Paul Graham immortalized passers-by with their eyes closed, absorbed in their thoughts, in the early 2000s, well before AirPods and smartphones monopolized all the attention.
Another key work of this ninth edition, also by a Briton, is the monumental and experimental installation created by Oliver Frank Chanarin. It juxtaposes analogue photography and cutting-edge robotic systems, manual photographic practice and automation, “showcasing the growing tensions between human and machine, past and future technologies”.
Closer to home, the Swiss photographer Vincent Jendly pays tribute to the “Belle Epoque” boats of the Compagnie Générale de Navigation sur le lac Léman (CGN). The largest piece of the Biennale with its 1000 m2, his image representing “La Suisse”, the flagship of the CGN, is visible on one of the facades of the Nestlé headquarters, on the edge of the lake.
>> Listen to the interview with Vincent Jendly in Vertigo:
Ukraine et immigration
Open to the public for the first time in its history, the completely redesigned gardens of the multinational Nestlé will exhibit the work of Vincent Jendly as well as the Japanese photographer Chino Otsuka. Traveling through time, she inserts portraits of herself as an adult into photographs from her childhood using Photoshop.
The war in Ukraine is also present. Based in kyiv, Sasha Kurmaz experiences it on a daily basis. To cope with this situation and denounce the Russian invasion, the artist creates a diary in the form of collages by collecting lots of materials from the rubble. “Red Horse” thus transforms “his personal testimony into a universal act of resistance”.
Also worth discovering is the work of the Chinese Guanyu Xu. “Resident Aliens” highlights the permeability of the homes of immigrants waiting to regularize their residence status and their difficulty in making their home an intimate place. A committed work, between China and the United States.
Ritual masks and “Poltergeist”
Angolan artist Edson Chagas reinterprets, through identity photographs, African masks, used in a historical ritual and spiritual context, in the present and everyday banality. A little similar, but in India, Gauri Gill collaborates with mask makers made for the ritual performances of a festival of the Adivasi community and indigenous peoples, between mythology and precarious reality.
Another look and in this case a “scathing commentary” on overconsumption and technological dependence: the project of the photographer from the United Arab Emirates based in New York, Farah Al Qasimi. Revisiting the film “Poltergeist” (1982), she criticizes the ubiquity of connected systems or intelligent devices that take control of our daily lives and invade private space.
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Ninth edition of the Biennale Images Vevey, from September 7 to 29, 2024.
