Bieler Fototage 2026

The 2026 edition of the festival places vulnerability at its core — not as an individual weakness, but as a shared social and political condition: a common good.

Overview

In a world shaped by multiple crises, the Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography brings together photographic practices that do more than document reality. These works create connections, revealoften unseen or marginalised experiences, and open spaces of attention, care, and sensitivity.

The programme unfolds across four main thematic axes: feminisms and body politics, affective ecologies and relationships with the living world, narratives of migration and hospitality, reparative artistic gestures, in which images become spaces of care, memory, resistance, and visual justice.

Through collaborative practices, critically engaged images, reappropriated archives, and forms of gentle resistance, audiences are invited to compose their own paths and narratives, without a prescribed route.

Each exhibition venue becomes a critical space for reflection, focusing on one of these questions and fostering dialogue between artworks, contexts, and publics. The festival brings together renowned Swiss and international artists, emerging voices, collectives, researchers, and activists whose work explores the social functions of images, their sensorypower, and their critical potential.

Images, we know, are not limited to documenting pain or injustice. They can also connect, comfort, and repair. In this sense, photography becomes a space of care, resistance, and the reconfiguration of the sensorial — a place where shared thinking, feeling, and action can emerge.