Biennale Images Vevey 2024
(DIS)CONNECTED Entre passé et futur

Festival: 7 – 29 September 2024

With its ninth edition the Biennale Images Vevey returns for three weeks, from 7 to 29 September 2024, with around 50 new projects and expects to welcome more than 60,000 visitors.

Every two years, this festival presents a new unique collection of made-to-measure indoor and outdoor photography exhibitions and displays, to be discovered free of charge throughout Vevey.

The featured artistic projects invite the visitors to experience images in a different way through monumental installations and scenography that is often unusual... The biennial has the particularity of custom designing its exhibitions in order to strike the perfect balance between the works, the scenography and the place in which they are exhibited.

This year’s topic "(dis)connected" focuses on a contemporary conundrum of when unavoidable nostalgia meets inquisitiveness about an unpredictable future.

(dis)connected: the theme of the Biennale Images Vevey 2024 explore one of the major issues of our time – the great divide created by digital technologies between past and present. The projects presented aim to create links between a certain nostalgia for the past and curiosity about an uncertain future. With this in mind, some fifty national and international photographic projects will be presented, playing on the feelings of connection and disconnection between tangible reality and digital fantasy. Indoors and outdoors, throughout the city of Vevey, artistic proposals play on the feeling of connection and disconnection between tangible reality and digital fantasy.

"It is pretty rare to be able to take a walk in an image of childhood." — Chris Marker, Letter from Siberia (1958)

It was in 1958 that Chris Marker wrote the words for Letter from Siberia, a kind of cinematic hybrid that was part docu-mentary and part personal essay on Siberia and its increasing modernisation. The French director and writer describes the city of Yakutsk in words that evoke the innocence and nostalgia associated with the city, likening his experience to walking throughchildhood memories. In this landmark film, which launched his career, Chris Marker also questioned the meaning of images bymanipulating the accompanying commentary and inserting imaginary newsreels.

Some fifty years on, this avant-garde film reflects thechallenges of today's world: it highlights the complexity of the times we live in. Like a seismic fault between two tectonic plates, our era is marked by the polarization of points of view and discourse, by incessant shifts oscillating between truth and falsehood, reality and virtuality, humanity and technology,nostalgia and curiosity. We are living through a pivotal moment in history, a Manichean age that stirs opposing forces, simul-taneously connecting and disconnecting. As rarely before, the present and future are being tested by rapid and profound changes that affect all sectors of society.

The technological developments of recent decades - the spread of the Internet, the transition from analogue to digitaltechnology, the growing use of social media and the considerabledevelopment of artificial intelligence - are marking a profound transformation in society. Oliver Frank Chanarin's monumental and experimental installation, one of the highlight of the ninth edition of the Biennale Images Vevey, contrasts analogue photography with the latest robotic system, manual photography with automation. It showcases the growing tensions between human and machine, and past and future technologies. The portraits of athletestaken by Katja Stuke in front of her television screen at the Olympic Games over the last twenty years reveal the evolution of photographic processes and television broadcasting techniques.

For 2024, the Biennale Images Vevey is looking at the unprecedented gap between past and future created by digital technologies. In this friction-filled world of today, everything isincreasingly connected, while at the same time everything seemsmore disconnected than ever. The divide between what has been, what is and what will be is accelerating, and opposites are colliding. This world generates a vague but ever-present feeling that revealsboth the instability and the excitement that surround us.

Echoing the words of Chris Marker, recent technological developments now make it possible to "walk through an image of childhood": the methods may change, but the principle remains the same. Artificial intelligence is a real memory factory, offering an unprecedented way of delving into the past and revisiting ourchildhood. Maria Mavropoulou uses the DALL·E software to feed in real stories passed on by her grandparents or those she has imagined herself, to generate a family album from scratch. Using the same software, Tamara Janes & Natalia Funariu create infinite variations on the childlike pattern of faces traced in the snow with a finger. Without using AI, Benjamin Freedman uses powerful CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) technology to reconstruct a family roadtrip when he was nine, while Chino Otsuka travels back in time by using Photoshop to inlay portraits of herself as an adult in photographs from her childhood.

Whether close-knit or dysfunctional, family relationships are at the heart of several projects in this edition. While Debsuddha admires the unfailing closeness of his two albino auntswho live together in their house on the fringes of Indian society, Alessandra Sanguinetti has spent more than twenty-five yearsphotographing two cousins growing up in the conservative Argentine countryside. Vuyo Mabheka evokes with his collages, of the few snapshots he has of his childhood, the loneliness of a Johannesburg township that marked this period of his life. Meanwhile, Sébastien Agnetti takes a tender look at the bonds he forged with his son, his mother and his deceased father. Sarah Carp explores her ex-husband's refusal to allow her two daughters to be publicly portrayed in a series of photographs of children whose faces are integrated a print raster.

A highly topical issue, social media has a huge influenceon how we shape and represent our lives and identities. Betweenreality and virtuality, Anna Galí's son led a double life that he keptcompletely secret from her, sharing his addiction to hard drugs onInstagram, Snapchat and X (Twitter). Jack Latham reveals the manipulation of social media by 'click farms', an underground system that threatens democracy by falsifying likes and followersof digital content on a massive scale. With self-mockery, Amandine Kuhlmann plays a hyper-feminine alter ego on various online plat-forms, portraying in her own way the limitless quest for viral fame.

Media such as film, television and advertising convey female stereotypes, which are addressed in two projects: on the one hand, Marion Zivera condemns the normalisation and idealisation of bodies generated by artificial intelligence; on the other, Nora Rupp personifies women from various backgrounds with the aim of deconstructing the representation of bodies and the roles of women in society.

One's image is generally determined by one's appearance, especially among young people. This issue lies at the heart of Zosia Promińska's series, in which she photographs pre-adolescent models in their childhood bedrooms, models who havebeen under contract to Polish agencies since they were young, waiting to work for the biggest international brands. A former topmodel, Marianna Rothen, takes a behind-the-scenes look at the modelling industry in an autobiographical and caricatural film. In the window of a Tokyo shop, Daido Moriyama captures a close-up of a plastic mannequin, one of the subjects of his urban views of the Japanese capital for over sixty years. Martin Parr's photographsof catwalk shows and photo shoots over the last four decades takea mischievous, unfiltered look at the world of fashion.

Through targeted advertising and influencer marketing,social media and websites, are constantly attracting users in an effort to sell all kinds of products. By following the algorithmic recommendations of his smartphone, Romain Mader the marketing strategies of fast-fashion websites that drive con-sumerism. A wry commentary on over-consumption and techno-logical dependence, Farah Al Qasimi's project criticises the omnipresence of connected systems and intelligent devices that take control of our daily lives and invade our private space.

Whether online or in real life, the boundaries betweeninside and outside, between domestic space and the public sphere, are sometimes porous, yet sometimes distinct. Between China and the United States, Guanyu Xu highlights the permeabilityof the homes of immigrants waiting to regularise their residency status, and the difficulties they face in turning their homes into private spaces. In the gardens of La Becque | Résidence d'artistes, Sabine Hess & Nicolas Polli take stock of their life together one year after moving in as a couple, building a house for the duration of the biennial, and share their suggestions for living in a harmonious relationship as a couple.

Living in harmony with one's surroundings and the society in which one lives becomes complex when one does not adhere to the way it works, and becomes inconceivable in times of war. Sasha Kurmaz, who lives in Kyiv, experiences this on a daily basis: to deal with this situation and condemn the Russian invasion, he created a diary in the form of collages by collecting a multitude of materials from the rubble, transforming his personal testimony into a universal act of resistance. During his many stays in the American West, Tony Dočekal meets people who live on the fringes of society, out of obligation or anti-system conviction.

In an age of information overload and fake news, the preservation and transmission of historical memory remains a central issue for society's future. As a temple of knowledge - both analogue and digital - the library has fascinated Candida Höfer, whose photographs of the world's most magnificent libraries, including that in Baltimore, pay homage to the world on the façade of the former prison in Vevey. Weronika Gęsicka uses AI to detect and display false definitions deliberately inserted into encyclopaedias by publishers in order to protect their copyright, and she questions plagiarism in the light of this powerful technology.

The legacy of image culture, in particular silver photography, and its material heritage are highlighted by two Swiss artists. Delving into Philippe Halsman's archives, Henry Leutwyler has created a portrait of one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century through his personal objects. Christian Marclay, meanwhile, has edited hundreds of film extracts to create an immense collage in which a succession of doors open and close in honour of the history of cinema, presented in the historic Cinéma Astor in Vevey.

Passed down from generation to generation, traditions play a fundamental role in preserving the past and collective memory, while enabling us to face future changes with a sense of wisdom. The Angolan artist Edson Chagas uses identity photographs to reinterpret African masks, used in a historical, ritual and spiritual context, in the contemporary and everyday. In India, Gauri Gill works with mask makers to create masks for the ritual performances of a festival of the Adivasi community and indigenous peoples, between mythology and fragile reality, while Tara L. C. Sood is interested in the ancestral tradition of Indian street magicians, whose legendary tricks have been imitated on Western stages for decades. By creating an imaginary symphony played in unison or individually by street musicians, Carlos Garaicoa highlights the power of the collective over the individual.

Faced with a vague future, the past becomes a source of comfort and creativity. Nostalgia is particularly prevalent in advertising, the media, pop culture and our daily lives. A nostalgic icon of the past, the Polaroid runs through the whole of Alexey Chernikov's original project, which combines this instantaneous process with artificial intelligence to narrate the last journey of a fictional couple before their separation. Thanks to AI, Maisie Cousins is reunited with the grotesque characters from Blobbyland, the famous UK theme park from the hit family TV show of the 1990s, which she visited as a child with her grandfather. Another mythical product taken straight from the cult film Back to the Future, the DeLorean, becomes an electric car and a mobile exhibition space for Beni Bischof.

Ultra-connected, autonomous electric vehicles, which Lisa Barnard has been studying in California, hold great promise for the mobility of tomorrow. In contrast, Vincent Jendly pays tribute to the 'Belle Époque' boats of the Compagnie Générale de Navigation sur le lac Léman (CGN), which have been plying the Swiss lakes for over a century. The official bus of the Biennial, designed by Nicolas Polli in collaboration with the VMCV public transport company, will be running outside, connecting people and places in the region. Tucked away inside the Salle del Castillo, Aleksandra Mir's inflatable airliner becomes an unlikely fictional character full of poetic contradictions.

The oil industry is both a driving force behind industrialisation and a factor in climate change. Kaya & Blank film the incessant movement of the oil pumpjacks that dot the Los Angeles landscape, while linking them to the very first photograph in history, made using Judean bitumen in 1826/1827. In Switzerland, the Aletsch Glacier, photographed by Andreas Gursky thirty years ago and whose monumental installation welcomes visitors to the biennial on the Place de la gare, evokes melting ice in the collective unconscious. From glacier to river to sea, the water cycle is explored in Madison Bycroft's science fiction film, set in the Alps and the Vevey region. Peter Hauser's experimental silver photographs open up a collective reflection on climate change and our links with the biosphere. For Jung Lee, the power of nature is paralleled by the intensity of love. In collaboration with the Mission Mycelium mushroom farm in Vevey, Phyllis Ma underlines the essential role played by fungi in protecting and regenerating the soil, while highlighting their impressive ability to form underground networks to reproduce, feed and communicate.

Although often inconspicuous, telecommunications networks criss-cross the entire planet, strung across the seabed with huge cables, strung above the ground or positioned in space to enable the world's population to communicate. In Los Angeles, Kaya & Blank are intrigued by the telephone masts camouflaged as fake trees that abound in the urban landscape. In Switzerland, the screenshots taken by Jenny Rova on her smartphone during video calls with her future husband Philippe, living illegally in Zurich, overcome the obstinacy of the cantonal administration to validate their marriage.

Finally, in the early 2000s, before the digital revolution, Paul Graham immortalised passers-by in Times Square, engrossed in their thoughts. 20 years later, the British photographer has disconnected these New York crowds by placing them in the streets of Vevey for the Biennale Images Vevey, offering 50 visual experiences under the theme '(dis)connected. Between past and future'.