Bieler Fototage 2025

Directed by Sarah Girard, the Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography has been celebrating contemporary photography for more than 25 years.

Overview

Each year during the month of May, venues both familiar and new in the city of Biel/Bienne are taken over by works and projects by some twenty Swiss and international photographers, which can be experienced in the form of a photographic walking tour. As well, thanks to our many partners, the exhibitions are complemented by a rich programme of events, including professional meetings, guided tours, talks and performances. Held in a bilingual city in the centre of Switzerland, the festival also develops each year projects that go out across Switzerland and abroad.

Whether it is a city, a forest or an industrial setting, the landscape is cleared, cultivated and inhabited. Defined as terrain transformed by human physical activity, it is also observed and represented in the form of maps, paintings, images or texts. Whether glimpsed through windows from inside or used as a background in Renaissance paintings, its conception has since developed and become more complex. Over time, our relation with the landscape has evolved, and its role in our constantly changing society is increasingly a subject of debate.

Whether structured or fragmented, the landscape is closely connected with the real or imagined relationship that human beings cultivate with it. To evoke it is to bring up a story, a setting, a scene; it is also to appeal to our memory and to call on us to express new ways of perceiving it, conceiving it and describing it. The 28th edition of the Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography presents new horizons and contemporary perspectives that offer new ways of representing landscape.  

Exhibited artists include Alexander Jaquemet, Virginie Otth, Anne-Marie Filaire, Julius Schien, Lalie Thébault Maviel, Léonie Rose Marion, Naara Bahler, Sébastien Reuzé, Aline d'Auria, Ahmed Khirelsid, Anastasia Mityukova, Phil Penman, Tshepiso Moropa and more.