Resistors

Hacktivism, Appropriation, and Artistic Tactics in the Digital Age

For the past 20 years, digital technologies have permeated every aspect of our lives—from our private lives to geopolitical dynamics—and artists have become witnesses, critical observers, and also actors in a necessary counter-narrative. For its 2026 edition, the Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques aims to explore the forms of artistic resistance in the face of the normative, extractivist, and oppressive logics of contemporary technologies.

The theme of resistance, explored through the lens of digital cultures, opens up a multifaceted space for reflection at the intersection of activism, subversive tactics, and artistic acts of disobedience. The aim is to examine how digital practices—whether drawn from performance art, installation art, or the performing arts—can become spaces for symbolic, political, and aesthetic struggle.

The curatorial framework for this edition is organized around five themes. The first focuses on the gestures and tactics of disobedience developed by artists in response to contemporary digital systems. A second group of works explores contemporary counter-cartographies: displaced memories, marginalized narratives, fragmented territories, and Mediterranean identities come together to form alternative sensory geographies. The third theme focuses on machine-generated languages and strategies of storytelling capable of resisting dominant narratives.

The Biennale also places a central focus on the relationships between technology, ecology, and conceptions of life. Earthquakes, geological phenomena, and the fragility of ecosystems become, in this context, forms of political expression capable of challenging dominant anthropocentric narratives. Finally, several exhibitions offer speculative perspectives in response to the dystopian imaginaries that have become ubiquitous. They affirm the need to rebuild desirable, collective, and livable futures.

To resist, in this context, does not simply mean to oppose. It also means reinventing narratives, fostering new ways of seeing the world, and keeping open the possibility of imagining things differently.

Mathieu Vabre, Artistic Director, and Jean Paul Fourmentraux, guest curator.

Guest Curator: Jean Paul Fourmentraux

For the 2026 edition, themed “Resistance,” CHRONIQUES has invited Jean-Paul Fourmentraux to serve as guest curator alongside Mathieu Vabre, the Biennale’s artistic director. His work on digital countercultures makes him an ideal partner for exploring the artistic practices of resistance and subversion at the heart of this theme.

The Biennale’s artistic program is developed collaboratively through cooperation among local partners. The Biennale’s artistic committee is composed of the artistic director and teams from CHRONIQUES, as well as partners and invited external figures. Decisions are made through consultation over the course of many months. The artistic projects selected and hosted align with the chosen theme and, in one way or another, reflect CHRONIQUES’ values and commitments to diversity in genres, aesthetics, and forms; plural identities; respect for humanity, and a focus on environmental and societal issues.