Rodrigo Hernández: The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World: Contour Biennale, Mechelen, Belgium

The Contour Biennale is Belgium's biennale of the moving image — founded in 2003 in the Flemish city of Mechelen by Etienne Van den Bergh, who curated the first edition by inviting fifteen artists, mostly from Belgium and the Netherlands, to install video works across eight historic locations in the heart of the city including St John's Church, the Church of the Beghinage and the contemporary art centre De Garage. The biennale ran biennially across the following decade under successive guest curators — Cis Bierinckx in 2005, Nav Haq's Decoder in 2007, Katerina Gregos's Hidden In Remembrance Is The Silent Memory Of Our Future in 2009, Anthony Kiendl's Sound and Vision: Beyond Reason in 2011, and Jacob Fabricius's Leisure, Discipline and Punishment in 2013 — before the editions of the late 2010s and 2020s that the editorial moments below trace in detail. It is the longest-running art biennale in Belgium, and, alongside the Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement in Geneva, one of the very few biennales in Europe whose constituting medium is the moving image rather than contemporary art at large.

The 11th edition, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, opens on 4 September 2026 and runs through 1 November under the curatorship of Sofia Lemos — the Portuguese curator and writer who served on the curatorial team of Contour 8 in 2017, who was associate curator of the second Riga Biennial in 2020, and whose practice across institutions including Museu de Serralves, MACBA Barcelona and Culturgest Lisbon has consistently programmed the intersection of moving image, ecology and critical theory. The edition's curatorial argument — that the contemporary moment is a moment of transformation, and that the figure of the heart and the figure of the world-soul are the working metaphors through which the question of how old systems and habits make way for the new can be put — is developed across a programme that returns Contour to its medium-specific premise while extending its political and ecological vocabulary in the direction Lemos's recent practice has built up over the last decade.

Commissioned by the City of Mechelen in collaboration with Contour Biennale and Kunsthal Mechelen. Photo by Filip Claessens.