SAVE THE DATE

October 2026

This October, one of the world’s leading biennials dedicated to the moving image crosses the Mediterranean.

For the first time in its history, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (BIM) leaves Geneva to be presented in Tunis, marking its inaugural edition on the African continent. At the same time, Art Explora’s Mediterranean Festival concludes its multi-year journey by choosing Tunis as its final destination.

Organised by the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, in partnership with the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and the Art Explora Foundation, the eighth edition of Jaou Tunis unfolds over one month through exhibitions, performances, concerts, conversations and public programmes, bringing together artists, writers, musicians and audiences from across the world.

At its heart is Becoming the Ocean, the principal exhibition of BIM’26, featuring sixteen newly commissioned artists from Africa, the Arab world, Asia, Latin America and their diasporas.

Taking its title from Khalil Gibran’s image of a river that mistakes transformation for disappearance, Becoming the Ocean reflects on a moment in which inherited political, economic and ecological systems are increasingly unable to respond to the crises they have produced. Rather than asking how to preserve a world already slipping away, the exhibition considers what new forms of relation, memory and solidarity become possible when we recognise that survival depends not on separation, but on interdependence.

Presented throughout the nineteenth-century Caserne El Attarine in the Medina of Tunis, the exhibition is accompanied by a city-wide programme of collateral exhibitions, performances, concerts, Jaou Nights, workshops and an encounters programme, bringing together artists, thinkers and audiences around the questions shaping our present.

23 October – 22 November 2026

We can’t wait to welcome you to Tunis!