The Eyes of the Heart and the Soul of the World

Participating artists: Gabriel Abrantes, Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela, June Crespo, Rodrigo Hernández, Özgür Kar, Ayoung Kim, Lucia Martinez Garcia, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, Claudia Pagès Rabal, Laure Prouvost,  Kivu Ruhorahoza & Christian Nyampeta, Lisa Spilliaert, Ana Vaz, and Yuyan Wang.

From September 5 to November 1, 2026, Contour Biennale presents its 11th edition, curated by Sofia Lemos, in Mechelen, Belgium. This edition marks the return of Belgium’s longest-running moving image biennial.

At a moment when imagination feels constrained by ecological crisis, political violence, and mediated fear, Contour Biennale 11 turns to the imaginal—the intermediary realm between the sensory and the symbolic—as a vital faculty of perception. Titled The Eyes of the Heart and the Soul of the World, it approaches images as forces that reveal rather than represent, reconciling inner and outer realities. The biennial engages practices attuned to visions, dreams, and projections that arise through life’s ongoing transformations—from gestation and birth to childhood and adolescence, from gender transition and ageing to love and loss, from climate crisis and exile to regeneration and return—as images that both move us and mobilise change.

Across five venues in Mechelen—heritage and cultural sites, gardens, and public spaces—the artworks trace continuities between registers of experience: infancy and ancestry, the technological and the elemental, the visible and the unseen. The parcours invites visitors to move through the city and attend to perception itself as a site of transformation: what might come into view when we learn to look differently?

At Kunsthal Mechelen, Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela construct a world of reflections, afterimages, shadows, and apparitions, while Yuyan Wang turns toward contemporary systems of extraction, finding tenderness within industrial structures driven by endless acceleration. June Crespo’s sculptural membrane absorbs traces of those who move around it, dissolving the viewer’s presence into its ghostly surface. Ayoung Kim brings together oil infrastructure, labour migration, family memory, digital animation, and speculative fiction in an immersive exploration of the social, technological, and ecological conditions shaping the Gulf region. Kivu Ruhorahoza and Christian Nyampeta consider how ancestral presence persists through objects, landscapes, stories, and everyday life, while Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn imagines a world after humanity’s decline, asking how successors might remember worlds they never knew, and how they might carry ancestors forward.

At dmvA, Özgür Kar stages an operatic encounter between two flies caught on a glue trap, turning mortality into a theatre of desire, tenderness, and absurdity. At TACK TICK, Claudia Pagès Rabal brings hidden histories of language, law, and ownership into dialogue with her two-year-old niece, whose voice opens meaning onto a world not yet fully named. Across flooded interiors, wildfire-ravaged forests, abandoned palaces, and devastated coastlines, Gabriel Abrantes' digitally animated ghosts drift through cycles of grief, conflict, reconciliation, and desire. Alongside temporary installations, this edition will present a new permanent sculpture by Rodrigo Hernández, where two bronze figures linger between sleep and wakefulness, proximity and separation, in the Stiltetuin at the Archbishop’s Palace.

At De Noker, Laure Prouvost imagines birth, motherhood, and oceanic interdependence as part of the same tidal movement. Her immersive installation binds the maternal body to marine and planetary worlds through sound, light, and suspended glass forms. Ana Vaz extends this ecology, using cinema as a form of metabolism in a dialogue between daughter, father, forests, and ancestors. Lisa Spilliaert follows three generations of women living together in Tokyo as the arrival of a newborn becomes a catalyst for collective transformation, while Lucia Martinez Garcia accompanies her sister through the affirmations, vulnerabilities, and visions of gender transition, approaching identity as a continual process of becoming.

Across these works, personal and planetary transformation emerge as one continuous process, experienced at different scales. Bringing together film, sound, sculpture, and installation, Contour Biennale 11 also reflects on what a biennial can be today: a structure for artistic risk, sustained attention, social encounter, and institutional transformation. 

The biennial will open with a professional preview on 4 September and to the public on 5 September, with a weekend programme of convenings and conversations. Throughout the autumn, it will offer a variety of public engagement activities with workshops, masterclasses, and guided tours tailored to different communities.

A companion publication to Contour Biennale 11 moves between essay, image, and story to suggest that cultivating a different quality of attention may open onto recognition, solidarity, and possibility. Edited by Sofia Lemos, with contributions by Teresa Solar Abboud, Arthur Campagna, and Federico Campagna, it will be available from 5 September, co-published and distributed by BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE.

The full curatorial statement, as well as further details about the artists, venues, and programme, are available on Contour Biennale’s website.

About Contour Biennale

Since 2003, Contour Biennale has grown into a cornerstone of Belgium’s contemporary art landscape and remains one of only two biennials in Europe dedicated to moving image. After its discontinuation in 2023, a group of Belgium-based curators, artists and cultural workers founded a new non-profit organisation to secure its future, with Kunsthal Mechelen as its main partner.

Under its renewed structure, Contour Biennale is rebuilding itself as a meeting point for both emerging and established curators and a platform for local and international practices in artists’ film and moving image. A dedicated board, led by Laura Herman as Chairperson and Joachim Naudts as Vice Chairperson, guides the Biennale, alongside the executive committee (Chloé Op de Beeck, Sofia Dati, Pieter-Paul Mortier).

Heidi Ballet was appointed Director of the Contour Biennale after having initiated its revival. Ballet has been part of Contour Biennale’s artistic committee since 2015 and works as an associate curator at DE SINGEL, Antwerp. She curated the Beaufort Triennial, the Lofoten International Art Festival - LIAF (with Milena Hoegsberg) and worked as a research curator at HKW in Berlin.

Contour Biennale is funded by the Flemish Community and supported by the City of Mechelen, Kunsthal Mechelen, as well as a wide network of Belgian and international cultural partners. It is a member of the International Biennial Association.

General inquiries: info@contourbiennale.org
Press inquiries: press@contourbiennale.org