The Eyes of the Heart and the Soul of the World at Contour Biennale 11, Mechelen

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

–Sofia Lemos