Every major contemporary biennial — Venice, documenta, the Whitney — programmes moving image at scale. So why does a biennale whose constituting medium is the moving image, like Contour in Mechelen or the Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement in Geneva or the Seoul Mediacity Biennale, continue to make sense as a separate institutional category? The answer is that medium-specificity remains a productive editorial premise.
The European biennial field is structured around three institutional categories. The first is the historical biennial of contemporary art — Venice (1895), São Paulo (1951), documenta (1955) — whose framing argument is the contemporary moment, programmed across all media that contemporary artists work in. The second is the nomadic or thematic biennial — Manifesta (1996), the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, which moves between European cities and which is constituted around the European condition as its subject. The third is the medium-specific biennale: the much smaller institutional category of biennales whose constituting subject is a single medium, programmed seriously and continuously as the working object of curatorial attention. The Contour Biennale, founded in 2003 in Mechelen, is the principal continuing European example of this third category for the moving image.
The structural objection — that the major contemporary biennials all programme moving image at scale, that Venice and documenta have for two decades reserved entire pavilions and entire halls for film and video, and that the medium-specific biennale is therefore institutionally redundant — has been made repeatedly across the 2010s and 2020s. The continuing answer the Contour programme makes, across the editions from Nicola Setari's 2015 Fooling Utopia through Natasha Ginwala's 2017 Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez's 2019 Coltan as Cotton to Auguste Orts's 2023 We Are Rooted But We Flow, is twofold.
The first argument is that medium-specific programming permits a depth of engagement with the working conditions of the moving image — its production economies, its distribution channels, its archive — that broad-spectrum biennials structurally cannot. The Coltan as Cotton edition in 2019 was the cleanest demonstration of that argument: Petrešin-Bachelez's programme took the question of the conflict-mineral supply chains that produce the screens through which moving image circulates and made that infrastructural question the working subject of the biennale across a year of programming in three phases. A contemporary biennial that programmes moving image alongside painting and sculpture cannot put the infrastructural question of the medium itself at its centre in the same way; the medium-specific biennale can.
The second argument is that the moving image's continuing institutional partner outside the museum — the cinema, the festival, the broadcaster, the streaming platform — produces a curatorial conversation that medium-specific biennales are uniquely positioned to host. The Seoul Mediacity Biennale, founded in 2000 as part of the Seoul Metropolitan Government's Millennium Project, addresses the question from the institutional side of the new-media museum and the technology biennial; Contour addresses it from the institutional side of the moving-image artist's practice and the heritage city. The two institutions, taken together, are the structural argument the medium-specific biennale continues to make against the broader contemporary field — and the Contouristen's reorganisation of Contour in 2024, after the long programmatic difficulty of the post-2019 period, is the working bet that the argument continues to hold.
The 2026 edition is the institutional demonstration of that bet. Sofia Lemos's appointment as curator — through an open international call, with a programme that consolidates the medium-specific premise rather than dispersing it into a multi-medium contemporary frame — is the editorial signal that Contour intends to continue programming moving image as its constituting medium across the second decade of its second decade. The institutional question that follows is whether the Flemish funding base, the Mechelen urban anchor and the international curatorial network can together hold the medium-specific position into the late 2020s, as the broader biennial field continues to consolidate around very large contemporary international exhibitions whose moving-image programming alone exceeds Contour's entire scale.
