BIAM 2025: Medellín and Antioquia Become a Stage for Contemporary Art

Between August and October 2025, Medellín and several municipalities in Antioquia will be transformed by the International Art Biennial of Antioquia and Medellín, BIAM 2025. Driven by the Institute of Culture and Heritage of Antioquia, this first edition aims to promote a decentralized celebration of art.

The International Art Biennial of Antioquia and Medellín, BIAM 2025, is an ambitious event that will connect contemporary art with the social and territorial dynamics of the department. With venues in Medellín and more than fifty municipalities in Antioquia, the event proposes a rereading of the biennial format to activate critical thinking through visual arts. Programming begins in August and will run through October of this year.
 

A Curatorial Approach with Territorial and Global Focus

The main curatorship is divided into two lines. The first, led by Lucrecia Piedrahita Orrego, curator and cultural manager, recognized for her work that brings together art, city, and heritage. The second, developed by Oscar Roldán Alzate, curator, researcher, and cultural manager, who served as chief curator of the Medellín Museum of Modern Art between 2008 and 2014.

The Medellín Art Biennial 2025 is positioned as a key event in the Latin American art scene, bringing together contemporary practices that engage with current social, territorial, and environmental challenges. With the provisional title Cartografías del Porvenir (Cartographies of the Future), the biennial will activate cultural, academic, and community spaces throughout the city. Through exhibitions, urban interventions, laboratories, and educational programs, the biennial seeks not only to showcase emerging and established artists from the country and the continent but also to propose new ways of building citizenship through art.

Voices from the World and the Territory

With artistic representation from four continents—America, Europe, Asia, and Africa—BIAM positions itself as a cultural bridge between the local and the global. The diversity of languages, contexts, and approaches will help build connections between distant realities, exploring themes such as the environmental crisis, migration, emerging technologies, historical violence, and community narratives.

Among the national artists represented by La Cometa are prominent figures such as Miguel Ángel Rojas, a pioneer of conceptual art in Colombia, whose work critically addresses issues such as sexuality, identity, extractivism, and drug trafficking. Carlos Castro reinterprets historical images and found objects to question official narratives with a sharp and provocative perspective. Camilo Restrepo crafts satirical compositions that intertwine truth and fiction, exposing distortions surrounding drug trafficking and the influence of elites on collective perception. Meanwhile, Alejandro Sánchez develops a hybrid practice between sculpture and painting, highlighting the new contemporary landscapes shaped by capital and its power dynamics.

The Nine Subregions of Antioquia as Exhibition Territories

One of BIAM’s key features is its decentralized nature. The nine subregions of the department—Urabá, Magdalena Medio, Northeast, North, West, East, Bajo Cauca, Southwest, and Aburrá Valley—will actively participate in the program, hosting exhibitions, urban interventions, educational processes, artist residencies, and creative laboratories. In this way, the biennial aims to broaden the reach of contemporary art by bringing it to rural communities and intermediate municipalities.
 

A Biennial with History and a Future-Oriented Vision

BIAM 2025 draws inspiration from the legacy of the Coltejer Biennials, which between 1968 and 1972 made Medellín a city open to modern art in Latin America. The new edition does not replicate their exhibition model but instead commits to art as a social tool, generating spaces for active participation, critical thinking, and the circulation of knowledge.

Driven by the Institute of Culture and Heritage of Antioquia, the biennial is also part of a broader strategy to strengthen the creative economy and cultural education in the region, aligned with the Departmental Culture Plan 2023–2035. With BIAM, Medellín and Antioquia aim to become an expanded map of freedom, where artistic creation meets the urgent questions of our time.