2024-03-23 03:18:17
March 23, 2024 Today at 04:05
Thirteenth edition of the Biennale de l’Image Possible (BIP) in Liège entitled MUTANTX, echoing a city in the midst of… change.
Created in 1997, the Liège Photography Biennale changed its name and perspective in 2016, extending its focus to works that go beyond the framework of photography. In 2020, this event is already choosing to change, abandoning the institutional places of culture in Liège such as the Boverie, to take place in the heart of the city (the old carpentries of the city of Liège).
Created in 1997, the Liège Photography Biennale changed its name and perspective in 2016, extending its focus to works that go beyond the framework of photography.
The 2024 biennial therefore takes place in the former Chiroux library (which has since moved), a space which extends over two floors and 17,000 square meters within a building allocated by the province of Liège and intended to then be sold.
Polyphonic Energy Laboratory
This event is called MUTANTX and refers to the chaotic transformation that the city of Liège is undergoing, particularly entangled for several years in tram work. Reference also, according to Anne-Françoise Lesuisse, artistic director of the eventto the energies that mutate and the desire to see life and art intersect in whatshe nicely defines it as “a laboratory of polyphonic energy”. The works cling as best they can to the faded walls or sit on the shelves, or even the neglected furniture.
The exhibition is therefore spread over two levels, welcoming installations, video, documents and, of course, the majority of documentary photography.
The scenography did not seek to modify the phantom use of the places, but rather by grafting itself onto it, and in effect by making them mutate: the exhibition is therefore spread over two levels, welcoming installations, video, documents and, of course, documentary photography in its majority.
Six mers
Located on the banks of the Meuse whose waves flow through the large bay windows, the flagship of the BIP is a sort of Noah’s ark or rather an artistic Notger with two bridges, and which then sails towards the “archipelagos “, other artistic places scattered throughout the river city or its surroundings and hosting projects included in the biennial.
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Six zones, six different “seas” constitute this ocean of open spaces for the first floor and corridors and small offices for the second, in which around fifty artists and their work are distributed.
Sometimes the documentary aspect is combined with formal beauty, notably in the case ofGerman Rafael Heygster which immortalized in color diverse populations struggling with covid, who seem frozen in a state of fascinating astonishment.
As for Yan Wang Preston Huanhis chronicle of the emergence of Chinese megacities replanting venerable trees in the middle of the skyscrapers and interchanges which dislodged them, his large color prints, in the wake of Andreas Gursky, provoke reflection as much as admiration.
In fact, this new Biennial of the Possible Image reveals itself to be the photo portrait (but not only) of our changing times.
“Biennial of the Possible Image: MUTANTX”
Note from L’Echo:
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