Images Vevey 2024

Since 2008, the Biennale Images Vevey has become the most significant biennial exhibition of visual arts in Switzerland and an international authority for contemporary photography.

Overview

Every two years, it brings artists, visitors and media from all over the world together around a unique concept: Whether indoors or outdoors, in parks or other public spaces, all the artists’ installations are custom-made and enhance the features of the Swiss Riviera.

The Biennale returns for three weeks with around 50 new projects and expects to welcome more than 60,000 visitors. This year’s topic (dis)connected focuses on a contemporary conundrum of when unavoidable nostalgia meets inquisitiveness about an unpredictable future.

The theme explores 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.

Among the exhibited artists are Farah Al Qasimi, Lisa Barnard, Beni Bischof, Tamara Janes and Natalia Funariu, Madison Bycroft, Sarah Carp, Edson Chagas, Carlos Garaicoa, Sabine Hess and Nicolas Polli, Amandine Kuhlman, Sasha Kurmaz, Vuyo Mabheka, Zosia Promińska and more.

In addition, the Biennial is thinking big with a very fitting monumental, outdoor, custom-made installation created in collaboration with the photographer Paul Graham for Times Square, one of the world’s most famous and vibrant neighbourhoods. Images Vevey has gained worldwide recognition for its site-specific installation art and, collaborating closely with Switzerland Tourism and Montreux-Riviera Tourism, has reserved some of Times Square’s giant billboards for one week from 13 May 2024. Showing photographer Paul Graham’s Sightless series in Times Square highlights one of Images Vevey’s distinctive hallmarks: the perfect match between artwork and its venue. The Sightless series of portraits were taken twenty years ago in Times Square – 42nd Street. It presents people walking through the city with their eyes momentarily closed, seeming lost in thought, long before smartphones monopolised our undivided attention. Images Vevey has seized this opportunity to put these passers-by back in their original setting before showcasing them in Vevey’s public spaces during this September’s Biennial. This idea is in sync with the subject chosen for the 2024 Images Vevey Visual Arts Biennial, as (dis)connected explores the unprecedented gap digital technologies have created between the past, present, and future. The rapid development of artificial intelligence is affecting everyone and all aspects of society, from ecology to geopolitics, the economy, arts, education, and leisure. Around fifty projects by artists from all over the world create links between nostalgia and inquisitiveness about an unpredictable future. The artists’ indoor and outdoor installations throughout Vevey focus on the sensations of connection and disconnection between tangible reality and digital fantasy.