BIENALSUR

A vast initiative targeting contemporary art, culture and thought.

Organized since 2015 from the southern corner of the planet, BIENALSUR is the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of the South supported by the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) in Argentina. 

A biennial with a difference: decentralized, democratic, horizontal and humanist, it tackles the themes of today's world. 

From its Kilometer O, the MUNTREF (Museum of the National University of Tres de Febrero) housed in the Hotel of Immigrants in Buenos Aires, to Tokyo, BIENALSUR traces a new cartography for contemporary art that spans 18,370 kilometers, while simultaneously linking art spaces, creators, audiences and communities from every continent. 

2015 marked the holding of a series of Sur Global meetings that are at the origin of a dynamic project relying heavily on dialogue, exchanges and presentations that are part of a diverse and sustainable public program. This is the foundation on which BIENALSUR was built. 

Its first edition in 2017 benefited from the participation of over 400 artists in around 80 venues across 34 cities in 16 countries. In 2019, this map expanded to 112 venues in 47 cities in 21 countries; then in 2021, despite the pandemic, the event took place in 120 venues in 48 cities in 24 countries in the Americas, Asia and Europe. Over 1,800 artists from all over the world took part in these three editions. 

BIENALSUR's unprecedented approach includes works and projects that are the fruit of open international calls, free and without determination of the subject to be dealt with. The aim of this wide-ranging call is to invite artists and curators to reflect on specific proposals, beyond a subject that conditions them, while pursuing their own interrogations.

From this Open Call emerges the curatorial paths and main lines for each edition, with the selection criteria based solely on the quality of each production, both conceptually and aesthetically. 

Director General: Anibal Y. Jozami 
Art Director: Diana B. Wechsler

BIENALSUR 2023

BIENALSUR continues to assert the right to culture and diversity, in the firm spirit of continuing to shape other paths for art and culture, in search of new logics of artistic and social circulation on a local and global scale. 

Over the course of six months, artists, curators, institutions and communities from the four corners of the globe will be joining forces with us to strengthen our actions and dynamically tackle the challenges posed by the contemporary world.

This program brings together works by Latin American artists working with the moving image, and proposes an aesthetic exploration of the process of evanescence. This singular state implies the passage from the visible and existing to the invisible, a change of state that projects in multiple directions towards a slow disintegration. 

The videos and films question how this evanescent condition can be approached. A culture, an ecosystem, a nation, a people and even a building may disappear in a given time span or in the space of an instant, but there are always ways of reappearing, making impermanence an opportunity for transmutation.Art offers the possibility of reincarnation through its expressive potential. In this sense, it's about exploring ways of coping with the absence of what was once solid and fully present, and is now no more than an image in our minds. 

Modos de desvanecimiento, like an inexorably growing bud, offers a myriad of possibilities as we ponder how to cope with radical processes of destruction and transformation. Conceived as memory exercises or critical oracles for thinking about our past, present and future, these videos guide us through the human experience.

Km11.066
Evanescences Video program
Paris, France, Maison de l'Amérique Latine 

ARTISTS

Julio Fermepin (ARG), 
Laura Huertas Millán (COL/FRA),
Florencia Levy (ARG), 
Tiziana Panizza (CHL),
Estefanía Peñafiel (ECU/FRA),
Jessica Sarah Rinland (GBR/ARG),
Paul Rosero Contreras (ECU), 
Ana Vaz (BRA) 

CURATOR  BIENALSUR:

BIENALSUR, Florencia Incarbone (ARG)