Vulnerabilities, 9.-31.5.2026
_ Vulnerability as a Commons
_ La vulnérabilité comme bien commun
_ Verletzlichkeit als Gemeingut
An artistic and political reflection on care, bodies, and community.
How can an image touch, resist, heal?
The 2026 edition of the festival places vulnerability at its core — not as an individual weakness, but as a shared social and political condition: a common good. In a world shaped by multiple crises, the Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography brings together photographic practices that do more than document reality. These works create connections, revealoften unseen or marginalised experiences, and open spaces of attention, care, and sensitivity.
The programme unfolds across four main thematic axes:
– feminisms and body politics,
– affective ecologies and relationships with the living world,
– narratives of migration and hospitality,
– reparative artistic gestures, in which images become spaces of care, memory, resistance, and visual justice.
Through collaborative practices, critically engaged images, reappropriated archives, and forms of gentle resistance, audiences are invited to compose their own paths and narratives, without a prescribed route.
Each exhibition venue becomes a critical space for reflection, focusing on one of these questions and fostering dialogue between artworks, contexts, and publics. The festival brings together renowned Swiss and international artists, emerging voices, collectives, researchers, and activists whose work explores the social functions of images, their sensorypower, and their critical potential.
Images, we know, are not limited to documenting pain or injustice. They can also connect, comfort, and repair. In this sense, photography becomes a space of care, resistance, and the reconfiguration of the sensorial — a place where shared thinking, feeling, and action can emerge.
Exhibitions Opening
29th edition of the Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography
Filmpodium Biel/Bienne: Vulnerabilities 23.4.-26.5.2026
This film series, running from 23 April to 26 May 2026, has been developed in collaboration with the Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography and echoes the theme of the festival’s 2026 edition (9–31 May): Vulnerability as a common good. Being seen is one of the most fundamental human needs, and can be a deeply moving experience: it affects not only the person being looked at, but also the one doing the looking. What happens when we find the courage to let down our masks and show ourselves as we truly are? When we acknowledge our uncertainties and fragilities, and through them new forms of mutual attention and care are woven? In this space of shared recognition, the need for protection and responsibility become a shared task; vulnerability is revealed as a collective experience, our common good.
“We’re all just walking each other home” as the spiritual teacher and psychologist Ram Dass reminds us. Major works such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, John Cassavetes’ Love Streams, Jacques Audiard’s De rouille et d’os, and Clara Law’s The Goddess of 1967 each tell, in their own way, how lonely and disoriented individuals come to recognise their vulnerabilities as a shared struggle, transform them into sources of resilience, and thus experience a profound sense of closeness. These are all films that make us aware of our shared humanity.
Hong Sang-soo’s new feature film, What Does That Nature Say to You, explores how the family can function as a network of solidarity and, with care and kindness, model different ways of approaching life. Conversely, Los Domingos by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa powerfully links family tensions to the perspective of a teenage girl in a society gripped by a crisis of faith: just like the family, a monastery can be a refuge, or a place of heightened vulnerability. Finally, Yalla Parkour by Areeb Zuaiter shows how a film itself can become a space of memory and resistance: in the mid-2010s, young parkour athletes transform the ruins of Gaza into stages for sporting feats — laden with painful losses but also with dazzling energy.
The public is invited to draw connections between the films in this series and those at the festival, in order to explore new ways of seeing. On presentation of a valid festival ticket, a discount of 5 CHF is available on all films in this series, as well as for the Campus Festival on 24 May.
Programme Vulnerabilities et information hier: www.filmpodiumbielbienne.ch
