The Contour Biennale offers a platform to curators and artists working with different forms of moving image, from film and video to installation. This reader accompanies the 8th edition of the biennale, dedicated to the notions of evidence and testimony. It includes texts and illustrated contributions by international artists, writers, poets, anthropologists, and filmmakers.
The Contour Biennale 8, “Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium,” curated by Natasha Ginwala, brings together twenty-five international and local artists and art collectives working in lens-based media, sound, performance, drawing, and installation. Taking place in Mechelen, Belgium, “Polyphonic Worlds” embraces the communal spirit of biennale by including the many-sided voices that assemble in collective formations as well as discrete, individual creative positions.
This reader proposes a series of beginnings—it is a polyphonic approach that borrows from juridical and musical spheres. Hearings comprises texts orginally published on the eponymous online journal that traces the artistic processes, conceptual methods, and historical research through textual as well as image and video-based contributions from a range of artists, writers, poets, anthropologists, and filmmakers. It is not a traditional exhibition catalogue but instead complements what is in the biennale, engages with current ideas and discourses, and reorients relationships around the artwork as a site of evidence and as a testimonial record.
