Sofia Lemos appointed curator of Contour Biennale 11

Contour Biennale is pleased to announce Sofia Lemos as the curator of its eleventh edition, which will take place in 2026 across the city of Mechelen, Belgium. Since 2003, Contour has engaged with the city’s layered histories through moving image. With Lemos’s appointment, the biennale enters a new phase, one attuned to transformation as both method and condition.

“We are thrilled to welcome Sofia Lemos to Contour,” says Heidi Ballet, Chair of the Contour Board. “She brings not only a breadth of international experience but also a sharp curatorial vision attuned to the role of art in navigating today’s complexities. Unafraid to work beyond conventional boundaries, Lemos will shape an edition that reaffirms Mechelen’s place on the contemporary art map.”

Statement by Sofia Lemos

Matrescence signals a threshold. Coined to describe the transformation that follows childbirth, it can gesture toward a broader, shared condition that encompasses all forms of becoming. Within this evolving ground, it names not only a shift in selfhood, but a profound metamorphosis—personal, planetary, and political—where inherited forms dissolve and new possibilities take shape across bodies, landscapes, species, and structures.

Drawing on the mystical tradition of mundus imaginalis, my proposal for Contour 11 approaches matrescence through the lens of the imaginal—a perceptual mode of emergent forms and visionary potential. Here, moving images become thresholds—ecological and technological, ancestral and spectral—where the visible and unseen meet. Not to reflect the world, but to actively participate in its re-imagining.

Since 2003, Contour has unfolded across Mechelen, activating its layered histories through moving-image, installation, and performance. Now, in its own matrescent arc, the biennale embraces transformation. Contour 11 will signal an opening toward what a new arts organisation can gestate and bring forth in the face of today’s ecopolitical challenges.

Biography

Sofia Lemos is a curator and writer whose work engages the intersections of art, performance, and discourse, with a sustained focus on ecology and critical practice.

From 2021 to 2024, Lemos was Curator at TBA21—Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, where she launched a programme centred on ecological and community-based practices, commissioning new work and convenings artists, performers, and thinkers. Between 2018 and 2021, she served as Curator of Public Programmes and Research at Nottingham Contemporary, where she developed live and collaborative projects, including the multi-year Sonic Continuum, exploring the sonic and its relationship to social change.

Lemos was associate curator of the 2nd Riga Biennial (2020), a visiting curator at Galeria Municipal do Porto (2017–18), and part of the curatorial team for Contour Biennale 8 (2017). She has collaborated with Culturgest, Galerias Municipais de Lisboa, Serralves Museum, Frac Sud, Kunstinstituut Melly, MACBA, MAMBA, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, among others.

She edited Reluctant Gardener (Bom Dia Books, 2025), Meandering: Art, Ecology, and Metaphysics (Sternberg Press, 2024), Sonic Continuum(Nottingham Contemporary, 2021), and Metabolic Rifts (Anagram, 2019, with Alexandra Balona). Lemos lectures regularly and contributes to international publications, including e-flux criticism, Frieze, Mousse, and Spike.