TUNIS.- There are moments in history when systems do not simply decline. They intensify.
Political orders cling more fiercely to exhausted certainties. Borders harden. Surveillance expands. Ecological collapse accelerates. Colonial logics return in new forms. What appears as stability often reveals itself as a desperate attempt to preserve a world already slipping away.
Psychologists describe this phenomenon as an extinction burst: the moment a behaviour intensifies just before it loses its power. Becoming the Ocean unfolds from within this condition.
Bringing together sixteen newly commissioned artists from across Africa, the Arab world, Latin America, Asia, and their diasporas, the exhibition explores how people live through moments when inherited structures no longer provide orientation and the future remains difficult to imagine.
The exhibition takes its title from a text attributed to Gibran Khalil Gibran, in which a river approaching the sea mistakes transformation for annihilation. Yet the river’s fear emerges from a failure of scale. What appears to be an ending is, in fact, an expansion. The crossing demands not disappearance, but the courage to enter a reality larger than oneself.
Presented within the Caserne El Attarine, a nineteenth-century military barracks in the Medina of Tunis, the exhibition brings together practices shaped by war, migration, ecological devastation, political struggle, ancestral knowledge, technological transformation, and the persistent contest over memory itself. Bodies become archives. Landscapes become witnesses. Histories surface and recede like currents beneath the visible world.
If the modern era was built upon fantasies of separation between nations, peoples, histories, species, and futures, Becoming the Ocean asks what it might mean to think from interdependence instead. Not as an ideal, but as a condition of survival.
At a moment when inherited structures appear increasingly incapable of responding to the crises they have produced, the exhibition approaches transformation not as resolution but as a practice: carrying memory forward while entering forms of relation not yet fully known.
The river arrives at the sea carrying everything it has ever been. The crossing asks for no forgetting. Only the courage to continue.
BIM’26 is a large-scale collaboration between the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, encompassing an exhibition in Tunis, public programmes, and a co-edited publication. Together, the two institutions seek to establish a sustained space for artistic production, critical inquiry, and transregional dialogue across Africa, the Arab world, Latin America, Asia, and their diasporas. Opening in Tunis within the eighth edition of JAOU TUNIS, BIM’26 will continue its journey through Geneva, Venice, and Brussels.
Artists: Tabarak Allah Abbas, Younès Ben Slimane, Mona Benyamin, S.A. Chavarría, Leena Habiballa, Roman Selim Khereddine, Zein Majali, Alaa Mansour, Paulo Nazareth, Diane Severin Nguyen, Liv Schulman, Hildegard Titus, Natasha Tontey, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Hajra Waheed & Sarah Zeryab
Curated by: Lina Lazaar and Andrea Bellini
Selection Committee: Mohamed Almusibli, Shumon Basar, Fatma Cheffi, Adam HajYahia, Xue Tan, and Eyal Weizman, alongside Bellini and Lazaar.
