BIOGRAPHY
b. 1983, Tacoma, USA. Lives and works in London, UK

Of Qatari-American origins, Sophia Al-Maria works with the concept of “Gulf Futurism”, whose themes include the isolation of individuals via technology and reactionary Islam, the corrosive elements of consumerism and the erasure of history in the service of fossil fuel. She is inspired by imagery from Islamic eschatology, post humanism and Science Fiction.

THE LIMERENT OBJECT, 2016
The Limerent Object is a call-and-response across deep time between the last living earthling and their extra-terrestrial anticedent. Mixing myths of a panspermic genesis and a Holocene apocalypse, The Limerent Object juxtaposes petroglyphs and porn, an alien queen and a dying human, a voice and the silence to evoke a love story that transcends the desert of millennia. This new work stems from the artist’s anxiety and fear for the future and the result is a poetic panegyric to the planet earth and we who people it.

[CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1972, Ravenna, IT. Lives and works in Milan, IT

Yuri Ancarani’s works transform the codes of documentary filmmaking in a monumental dimension. The man in action, the protagonist of his artworks, becomes transfigured through a rigorous construction of image and sound.

THE CHALLENGE, 2016
The movie The Challenge, presented as part of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, follows the journey of an artist who becomes a playful anthropologist, exploring the leisurely activities of the Qataris, the inhabitants of a small country who have gained remarkable media attention in the last few years through their unconventional lifestyle and their exuberant wealth: an advanced techno-capitalistic world where the ancient symbols of wealth and power (gold, rifles, sports cars, etc.) are ubiquitous. The hunt reveals the role of rare and expensive falcons, which are employed in ritualized forms of hunting.

[CINEMA SPOUTNIK, 10.11.2016, 21.30]

[CINEMA DYNAMO, CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN, from Tuesday to Sunday 11.00]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1985, London, UK. Lives and works between Amsterdam, NL, London, UK and Lagos, NI

Karimah Ashadu, an artist of British and Nigerian origins, uses experimental modes of moving image capture aided by hand-crafted devices to explore perceptions of self and place.

RED GOLD, 2016
For the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Ashadu presents Red Gold – an experimental short film touching on the socio-economic context of Nigeria. Before Nigeria’s independence in the 1960s, it stood as one of the wolrd’s largest producers and exporters of palm oil, but since the discovery of crude oil, agriculture became a neglected industry. With no help from the government, farmers with skills and land passed down through generations have struggled through the years to sustain their families and keep their craft alive. Focusing on a group of hardy palm oil farmers in Ekiti State, Western Nigeria, Ashadu reflects on sentiments of independence and value.

[CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1985, New York, USA. Lives and works in New York, USA

Trisha Baga’s immersive environments position the viewer in a playful negotiation between the concrete and the simulated. Her intricate videos operate on several levels of experience, mimicking the manner in which our perceptual landscape now weaves between digital and physical.

MABUHAY, 2016
Trisha Baga’s project for the BIM 2016, entitled MABUHAY, is an abstract narrative following the road trip movie format. Employing 3-D effects, Baga creates a stratified narrative that aimst to find logic in the viewer’s own processes of association: an approach where consciousness becomes the protagonist. MABUHAY investigates, in the artist’s own words, “my family history, the history of the Philippines, layers of colonization as seen through representation and appropriation, the convergence of Catholic and American pop culture sensibilities, what happens to a mountain made of clay when it gets hit by a typhoon, and what happens when a van tries to drive up it.”

[CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1983, Arras, FR. Lives and works in Paris, FR

Through videos installations, sculptures and drawings, Bertille Bak questions the notions of identity, community, territory and memory, making the indigenous people the standard bearer of her works. Her stories attempt to define the present living conditions of a group with a constant concern for maintaining social bonds.

USINE À DIVERTISSEMENT, 2016
For the 2016 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Bertille Bak proposes Usine à divertissement, a project focused on the flourishing and threatening growth of the tourism industry close to traditional indigenous populations. With a three-channel video installation, Bak investigates three minor communities from Thailand, Morocco and Camargue, exposed, or about to be exposed, to tourism. Through this socially engaged work, Bertille Bak implicitly criticizes occidental capitalism’s stranglehold on mass tourism, akin to human safaris trampling local communities’ interests and integrity.

[MAMCO]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1986, Casablanca, MA. Lives and works in Paris, FR

Benefitting from both an artistic and scientific training, Berrada’s work combines intuition and knowledge, science and poetry. From the laboratory to the workshop, from chemical experiment to performance, the artist explores in his works scientific protocols that mimic as closely as possible various natural processes and climatic conditions.

BOOM – NATURAL PROCESS ACTIVATION #4, 2016
For the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2016, Hicham Berrada presents Boom – Natural Process Activation #4, a movie in which the artist brings out the activation of natural processes. In the Moroccan desert, a detonation of dynamite in a mirage leads to the formation of a well, and sets off the slow transformation of the environment into an oasis. The artist’s gesture is limited here to the initial triggering: once the explosion has been provoked, nature takes over, and the artist joins the viewer in observing the consequences of his gesture. Boom is a film evolving through a number of seasons, and the video will be added to with each new screening.

[CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1982, Nairobi, KE. Lives and works in London, UK

Phoebe Bowell’s story – her identity – is rooted in her “expatriate” and transient past, her trajectory is always anchored to a personal exploration of “home”. Her work combines drawings, animations, digital technology and complex installations to form a language through which she communicates global, fragmented narratives like hers

MUTUMIA, 2016
For the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Boswell proposes Mutumia. In the artist’s mother tongue, mutumia is the general term for ‘woman’, which loosely translates as ‘the one whose lips are sealed’. With Mutumia, Boswell proposes an immersive multimedia installation, where sequences of images, animations and sounds make up a salute to women in African history who have used their bodies in direct acts of resistance in conflicts where they haven’t been permitted to use their voices. The visitor will be both active and passive, observer and observed, confronted by an army of projected women, and invited, through their very presence, to enable female voices to be heard.

[MAMCO]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1975, Norfolk, USA. Live and works in Los Angeles, USA

Brian Bress’s time based media works have been described as inventive, humorous, and “discomfortingly complex.” As an inventive form of portraiture, they employ flat-screen monitors, which make his works appear to be conventional photographs or even paintings, each depicting one or more figures rendered abstract through the use of masks and costumes.

MAN WITH CIGARETTE, 2016
For the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Bress creates a four panel video wall, presenting a life-size full figure portrait that replicates in three dimensions (as a costume) a found pen and ink drawing of a man in a full dress suit smoking a cigarette. The style of the found drawing being replicated is full of awkward details, bad perspective and impossible forms. As in past works Bress draws on two-dimensional sources, such as Sol Lewitt’s Dazzle Camouflage, as well as his own collages, and sets out on the impossible task of bringing what can only exist in two dimensions into three dimensions and then compressing it back down to two dimensions using the video screen.

[MAMCO]

BIOGRAPHY
b. USA. Lives and works in New York and Los Angeles, USA
b. 1982, Massachusetts, USA. Lives and works in New York and Los Angeles, USA

Performer boychild and Wu Tsang collaborate in film and live performance, exploring different forms of storytelling through the languages of visual art, cinema, drag, and movement.

YOU SAD LEGEND, 2016
For the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, boychild and Wu Tsang present a new iteration of their ongoing performance collaboration, featuring the experimental cellist Patrick Belaga, which explores different modes of storytelling through an improvisational structure of voice, movement, and musical score. Their new piece, called You Sad Legend, accompanies Tsang’s film project, Duilian (also presented during the BIM) about the Chinese revolutionary poet Qiu Jin (秋瑾, 1875-1907) and her intimate friend, the calligrapher Wu Zhiying (吳芝瑛, 1868-1934).

[LE ZOO, USINE, 11.11.2016, 23.00]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1970, Gothenburg, SE. Lives and works between Stockholm, SE and Addis Abeba, ET

Cherinet works primarily with video installation, characterised by a mode of storytelling that uses film improvisation to probe perceptions of abstract notions. Her work is rich with references to the cities she lives in and the people she meets, often focusing on the human body, its affective life, social life and political functions.

AXIS, 2016
For the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Loulou Cherinet proposes Axis, a film project linked to the concept of kinetic energy and the sensation that time, the direction of time, has changed due to the accelerating scale and complexity of memory technologies, digital infrastructures and more-than-human societies. Her film is a spatial montage of moving images constructed in the actual room inside which it is installed. The work draws from Cherinet’s continuously expanding archive of video, audio, found photographs and stock footage. The project’s form insists upon the present as the primary category of human experience and will fixate its origin at Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement.

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1992. Lives and works between London, UK and Los Angeles, USA

Working impulsively, musician and film director Alessio Di Zio immerses himself in chosen environments to creates very personal films. Initially shot for personal use, his films gained notoriety for their artistic touch and their particular image treatments.

GENESEE, 2016 / SIOUX RAPIDS, 2016
For the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Alessio Di Zio presents Genesee and Sioux Rapids, two highly improvised fantasy short films set in artificial environments and featuring moments of strange magic, fictional dimensions, iconic imageries, impressions and glimpses of his own fantasies and dreams.

(These films’ postproductions have been made in the studios of the Cinéma du réel of the HEAD – Genève)

[CINÉMA SPOUTNIK, 12.11, 16.00]

Sioux Rapids

[CINEMA DYNAMO, CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN, from Tuesday to Sunday, 12.58]

Genesee

[MAMCO]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1976, Askim, NO. Lives and works in Oslo, NO

Bodil Furu is an artist working with documentary filmmaking where abiding humanistic questions meet current concerns of globalisation and the mediation of reality. Her visual language often examines landscapes that do not appear untouched or neutral, but rather shaped by territorial behaviour and social conflicts.

MANGEURS DE CUIVRE, 2016
For the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Bodil Furu presents Mangeurs de cuivre, a film portraying the actors of the Katanga copper mining industry in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Following a local chief, a businessman, and a development worker, the film offers contrasting views on how copper mining influences the villages and the country as a whole. As silent witnesses, the landscape is introduced with its vast alterations and the disenfranchised people of the region. This film aims to give analytic tableaus of the neo-colonial world order, discussed controversially and with an open end.

[CINÉMA SPOUTNIK, 11.11, 17.00]

[CINEMA DYNAMO, from Tuesday to Sunday, 15.53]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1989, Lisbon, PT. Lives and works between Lausanne, CH and Paris, FR

Both actress and director, Jenna Hasse explores the duality of her condition through her films and stages the intimate through the life of her protagonists. She is inspired among others by her own history, humankind’s relationship with nature, sensations and the resulting emotions.

SOLTAR, 2016
For the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Jenna Hasse directs Soltar, a story about two characters, Margaux (played by the artist) and Bruno, leaving on their holidays to Portugal. Throughout the movie, we discover an increasing anxiety, caused by Bruno’s paranoia. The artist places the two characters in the middle of a duality, two entities impossible to reconcile for Bruno. This feeling is accentuated by the environment, an electronic music festival, with its crowd, wild dances and community life contrasting with the natural way of life, the immensity of the beaches and the adjacent ocean.

[CINÉMA SPOUTNIK, 10.11, 20.30]

[CINEMA DYNAMO, from Tuesday to Sunday, 13.13]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1976, Paris, FR. Lives and works in Paris, FR

Having explored the queer, feminist and post-porn movements for 15 years—through intimate portraits and other subversive mise-en-scènes—Emilie Jouvet’s films and videos question and disrupt the social standards affecting the norms and representations of desire.

Aria, 2016
(co-produced by Everybody’s Perfect)
For the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Emilie Jouvet presents Aria, a movie about queer parents, identity and family constructions. It is through a series of portraits, of people leaning their faces over her belly that the artist proposes a diversity of stories and reflections on motherhood, parenthood, the desire or not to have a child, descent and childhood. Entirely shot using smartphones, the film proposes an intimate journey, told via sensitive, fun or moving words, a contemporary family album.

[CINÉMA SPOUTNIK, 11.11, 18.30]

[CINEMA DYNAMO, from Tuesday to Sunday, 13.37]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1979, Athens, GR. Lives and works in Paris, FR

Evangelia Kranioti is an artist working in cinema, photography, text and video installation. Her practice involves immersion in different social contexts, and culminates in the creation of both documentary and fiction works. Her artistic and anthropological research explore the themes of exile, origins, wandering and desire.

SAMBA NO ESCURO, 2016
Samba no escuro, the work of Evangelia Kranioti for Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, is a tale about illusion and transformation set in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) a few months ahead of the Olympic Games. A documentary fiction, it explores gender and urban rituals in the hedonist realm of the cidade maravilhosa. Across spiritualism and transsexuality issues, from the Sambodromo bacchanal to the favela carnaval, two creatures —a wandering clown and the carioca transvestites’ queen— tell the story of bodies in endless metamorphosis.

(This film’s postproduction has been made in the studios of the Cinéma du réel of the HEAD – Genève)

[CINÉMA SPOUTNIK, 12.11, 17.00]

[CINEMA DYNAMO, CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN, Tuesday-Sunday, 12.08]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1987, Lisbon, PT. Lives and works in Lisbon, PT

In a fertile occupation of no man’s land, Lamas attempts to dissolve the apparent border between documentary and fiction; with an interest in the intrinsic relationship between storytelling, memory, and history, while using the moving image to explore the traumatically repressed, seemingly unrepresentable, or historically invisible, from the horrors of colonial violence to the landscapes of global capital.

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD, 2016
There is no need to design or stage an apocalyptic landscape, for the earth we inhabit is already in crisis and the apocalypse is now. Attempting to redefine ethnographic film tradition The Burial of the Dead – Lamas’ project for the Biennale de l’Image Mouvement – is a video installation set in the Peruvian town of La Rinconada at an altitude of 5,200 meters on the edge of a gold mine; it captures a dystopian world that scarcely seems possible in the 21st century. Lamas has constructed a cinematic triptych to convey the extremity of this situation and the dimensions of its misery without having to resort to graphic images – indeed a dantesque escherscape of haunting beauty.

[CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1982, Massachusetts, USA. Lives and works in New York and Los Angeles, USA

Wu Tsang’s films, installations, performances, and sculptures move fluidly among documentary, activism, and fiction. Her works interweave emotion with conceptual questions of voice and translation in relation to difference. Her projects have been presented at museums and film festivals internationally.

DUILIAN, 2016

For the Biennale de l’Image Mouvement, Wu Tsang presents Duilian, a short experimental film that takes the narrative form of an illegitimate “wild history” (野史 “yěshǐ”). While set in the present, the film explores the intimate relationship between Chinese revolutionary poet Qiu Jin (秋瑾, 1875-1907) and calligrapher Wu Zhiying (吳芝瑛, 1868-1934). Qiu Jin was executed as a traitor during the Qing dynasty, and has been alternately heralded as a nationalist martyr, a communist hero, and feminist icon. The film combines magical realism, documentary, and the kung fu genre to question how history is constructed, by “reading between the lines” of official narratives.

[CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1977, Leskovac, RS. Lives and works in Belgrade, RS

Former journalist, Boris Mitić thrives on finding creative solutions to boring or cinematically impossible themes. He plays blitz chess, writes satirical columns, makes populist elitist films and lectures in offbeat ways at academic and industry events worldwide.

ONCE UPON A NOTHING, 2016
For the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Boris Mitić presents Once upon a nothing, an impressionist parabole. In this work-in-progress documentary parody, Nothing, tired of being misunderstood, runs away from home and comes to address us for the first and last time. Nothing’s narration, distilled from the most eclectic bibliography ever used in a documentary film, is metaphorically illustrated by a unique ‘documentary footage of Nothing’ filmed by dozens of complementary cinematographers from around the world, in an anonymous online brainstorming process that will be presented at BIM parallel to the film.

(This film’s postproduction has been made in the studios of the Cinéma du réel of the HEAD – Genève)

[CINEMA SPOUTNIK, 10.11, 18.00]

[CINEMA DYNAMO, from Tuesday to Sunday, 17.14]

BIOGRAPHIE
b. 1974, Durban, ZA. Lives and works in Durban, ZA

Rose est surtout connue pour ses performances, ses installations vidéo et ses photographies. Son travail répond aux limites du dogme et aux failles du discours culturel institutionnalisé, en lien à la politique de l’identité et critiquant les stéréotypes sexuels, raciaux ou de genre.

SHOOTING DOWN BABYLON (THE ART OF WAR), 2016
Shooting Down Babylon (The Art of War), le projet de Tracey Rose pour la Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, s’intéresse à la cartographie du mouvement, aux codes de la gestuelle, aux rites et aux rituels. La pièce combine des séquences tournées par des caméras fixées sur et autour du corps de l’artiste alors qu’elle effectue une chorégraphie et sur des voix isolées provenant d’une cérémonie Ayahuasca, un rituel de purification des forêts amazoniennes. La structure externe de l’installation ressemble au temple de Baphomet ; alors qu’à l’intérieur, le visiteur se verra plongé dans une installation audiovisuelle prenant la forme d’une discothèque où le spectateur pourra vivre une expérience exorcisante.

Courtesy Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève et Dan Gunn, Berlin

[CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1983, Ascot, UK. Lives and works in London, UK

Cally Spooner’s diverse practice includes essays, media installations and live events, which grapple with the organisation and dispossession of that which lives. She often uses rehearsals, or the episodic form, as a means, and an end, in itself.
DRAG DRAG SOLO, 2016
For the BIM Cally Spooner proposes DRAG DRAG SOLO, an installation of sound, and a backdrop of mute moving-image, which emerges from her current, ongoing study, On False Tears and Outsourcing. Since June 2015, this project has manifested as installations, lectures, essays, workshops, prose. In each instance, these iterations begin from her speculative definition of outsourcing; to a sterile language engineered by institutional/industrial bodies, which may then manage, control and probably (accidentally) erode life. For the BIM, Spooner augments this study with a constellation of unsynched side-shoots and spin offs.

[MAMCO]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1973, Boston, USA. Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA

Tribe’s rigorously-crafted, research-based projects use the structure, language and materials of the moving image to explore topics ranging from butterfly wings to space travel. Much of her work explores consciousness, perception and the critical potential of representational technologies.

EXQUISITE CORPSE, 2016
For her contribution to the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Kerry Tribe presents Exquisite Corpse, a 51-minute installation that follows the 51-mile Los Angeles River from its origins in the San Fernando Valley north east of the city to its terminus at the Pacific Ocean. Using a detailed map as a script, Tribe’s camera captures the river’s varied landscapes, neighborhoods, inhabitants, and communities through a string of meditative encounters that collectively describe the site, and the city, at this juncture in its history.

[CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN]

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1977, Rugby, UK. Lives and works in Lisbon, PT

Emily Wardill’s work takes an interest in the appropriation of models to express ideas and the way in which fixed scenarios become exemplary. She explores the opacity of communication to deconstruct the way in which materials or the implication of the material are used to elucidate ideas.

I GAVE MY LOVE TO A CHERRY THAT HAD NO STONE, 2016
For the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Wardill presents I gave my love to a cherry that had no stone. Holding in her mind Dorothea Tanning’s painting Some Roses and their Phantoms (1952) and its sickening presentation of objects as between states of being, Wardill made a film that also hovers between definitions. The architecture of the Gulbenkian auditorium in Lisbon, its colours and sense of being lost in time accompany us through a loop where a man wanders the building at night, followed by something that is not human. Through the care and paranoia with which she approaches the digital image, the artist investigates the haunting of the present by the past and the remnants of textures longing to be touched.

[CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN]