Contour Biennale 11 (2026)
The Eyes of the Heart and
the Soul of the World
A multi-site exhibition across five venues, a publication, and a public programme in Mechelen, Belgium.
The Eyes of the Heart and the Soul of the World. Views at Contour Biennale 11, Mechelen (2026). Photos: Alhasan Yousef and Filip Claessens. Courtesy of the artists and Contour Biennale.
From cave paintings to machine vision and mythic symbols to data-driven imaginaries, images have shaped how we perceive, imagine, and inhabit the world, orienting our collective sense of belonging and becoming. They generate possibilities, organise time, and mobilise affect—connecting past and future, the ecological and the ancestral, the technological and the spectral.
Across these thresholds lies a subtle realm where the visible and the unseen meet: the imaginal, a space of potentiality where desire and lived experience converge, perception shifts, time resets, and language forms at the edges of consciousness. Here, in what Henry Corbin called ‘the world of the soul’, images acquire visionary force, seen through the ‘eyes of the heart’.
Delving into the invisible frequencies of personal and planetary becoming, Contour Biennale 11 engages the visions, dreams, and projections that arise through life’s ongoing transformations: from gestation and birth to childhood and adolescence; from gender transition and ageing to love and loss; from climate crisis and exile to regeneration and return—as images that both move us and mobilise change.
Such transitions—profound metamorphoses at once intimate, political, and planetary—are continuous with cycles of growth, decay, and emergence that traverse human and non-human life alike. From within them, images reveal rather than represent, blurring the boundary between the world as it is and the world as it might be.
Situated across the historic city of Mechelen, Contour Biennale 11 unfolds through a parcours of site-specific works in film, sound, sculpture and installation, expanding the possibilities of the moving image today. Together, the artists conceive the imaginal as an ecology of the possible, where images emerge as living forces: mirrors through which our shared capacity to transform and be transformed becomes perceptible.
Contributors
Gabriel Abrantes, Mariana
Caló & Francisco Queimadela,
June Crespo, Rodrigo
Hernández, Özgür Kar,
Ayoung Kim, Lucia Martinez
Garcia, Tuan Andrew Nguyen,
Claudia Pagès Rabal, Laure
Prouvost, Kivu Ruhorahoza &
Christian Nyampeta, Lisa
Spilliaert, Ana Vaz, Yuyan Wang.
Dates
5 September–1 November, 2026
Team
Director: Heidi Ballet
Project Coordinator: Daphné Charitos
Exhibition Manager: Gamze Öztürk
Production - Special Projects: Silvana Fiorese
Curatorial Assistant: Martinet Elorduy Masip
Curatorial Fellow: Bethan Burnside
Interns: Zinnia Fay Fay, Manuela Martinez Dominguez
Exhibition Design: Studio PARA
Graphic Identity and Guidebook: Bureau BoschBerg
Read
Exhibition Guide
Support
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation – Delegation in France; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian; Embassy of Portugal in Belgium; Ágora – Cultura e Desporto do Porto; Galeria Francisco Fino; Embassy of Spain in Belgium; Institut Ramon Llull; Generalitat de Catalunya; Acción Cultural Española (AC/E); Etxepare Euskal Institutua; Catapulta – A Launchpad for Contemporary Spanish Art; Mondriaan Fonds; Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands; French Embassy in Belgium; the Institut français; République et Canton de Genève; SAHA; Kunstencentrum nona; NW, Open House for Contemporary Art and Film; Curatorial Studies – KASK & Conservatorium; Academie Mechelen; Beursschouwburg; STUK; Argos; Kunstenpunt; escautville; PAM.