The world's largest cultural event, recognised by UNESCO, opens on Thursday 26 June at the MAMBO and the Museo Casa de Moneda. It continues on Friday 27 at the Centro Colombo Americano in Medellín and the Centro Cultural Banco de la República in Manizales. Starting on 26 June, BIENALSUR 2025 expands to the world. From Colombia will begin the tour of the edition that celebrates ten years of the most extensive global art event. The Andean country stands out in a transnational cartography that brings together artists, curators and institutions committed to art as a tool for inclusion and transformation, and that uphold access to culture as a fundamental ethical principle. Through a journey of 19,640 km of contemporary art, BIENALSUR in its 5th edition will have 140 venues in more than 70 cities on the five continents, proposing a critical and sensitive dialogue that allows for the construction of a contemporary, dynamic and universal humanism with the most urgent issues of our time: artificial intelligence, environmental issues, human rights, migrations, memory and possible futures. The programme of BIENALSUR 2025 begins at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá - MAMBO (Km 4659) where the exhibition Labyrinths of Memory will be inaugurated. The evanescence of memory and its capacity to reconvert narratives is displayed in the selection of works by artists Sergio Vega (ARG/USA), Jorge Andrés Marín Vázquez (COL), Siru Wen (CHN) and Alaa Tarabzouni (SAU). "Imagining a labyrinth involves visualising a complex circuit, of which the entrance is known, but not the exit. Thus, the proximity between labyrinth and memory is presented in this exhibition as a possible metaphor", say the curators of the exhibition, Diana Wechsler, artistic director of BIENALSUR, and Eugenio Viola, director of MAMBO.
The same afternoon will also see the opening of EconoMystery at the Museo Casa de Moneda (Km 4657). Focusing on the ambivalent relationship between art and money, the show brings together the work of Marta Minujín (ARG), Cildo Meireles (BRA), Dagoberto Rodríguez (ESP/CUBA), Alicia Herrero (ARG), Esteban Álvarez (ARG) and Laura Ojeda Bär (ARG).
Meanwhile, on Friday 27 June it will be the turn of To the Letter, at the Centro Colombo Americano in Medellín (Km 4887). The works of the artists Astrid González (COL), Nova Pan (CHN), Rosa Navarro Barandica (COL), Leticia Obeid (ARG), Daniela Ortiz (PER) and Ivana Vollaro (ARG), problematise language through translations and geographical accents, as well as addressing its communicative, political and symbolic aspects. "Tensions arise at its borders: between what is said and what is silenced, what is understood and what is distorted, what is translated and what is lost along the way, what is dictated and what is written down. Language becomes a space of friction, negotiation and resistance", explains the curator of the BIENALSUR team, Clarisa Appendino. With this exhibition the institution joins the biennial for the first time, which continues to add venues to its line-up.
On the 27th the presentation of River Crossing, by Adriana Bustos (ARG), will also be open to the public at the Centro Cultural Banco de la República in Manizales (Km 4762). Questions about Latin American identities and Rio de la Plata subjectivities sail through these works," describes the artist. Each one of them throws, as if it were a hook or a fishing net, a question into the water and collects mud, layers and layers of organic sediments that take shape, for just a moment, to be diluted again in the swell of history-myth".
Colombia's participation in BIENALSUR will continue in the coming months with a series of academic talks in the city of Cúcuta and another exhibition in Manizales.
