This 17th Lyon Biennale invites artists to address, question and investigate the subject of the waxing and waning relationships of human beings with one another and with their environment.
For this project, we draw on the region’s natural and human geography, and on the spirit of the Biennale’s new venues: Les Grandes Locos and the Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie.
Its venues generally, among which macLYON has the longest- standing ties with the Biennale, are permeated by the question of relationships and of welcoming the other. They embody history, diversity and the invention of community practices. Their walls conjure rituals of conviviality and ways of being and making together.
The artists will cause the distinctive voices of these places—their stories and their social characteristics—to resonate. The buildings still bear the traces of those who worked and lived there, or inhabited them. These places of construction and repair, of care and hospitality, of attentiveness to others, unveil as many destinies as they do types of relationship—norm-based, programmed, imaginary, hoped-for.
The worlds of the artists, whom we wanted to offer sufficient room to stretch out, compose a score in space; a choral recital that melds their works with their relationship to places, to others, to the generations around them, to friendships that are built, to the collectives that come together to wage a common struggle or in the hope of forming lifelong relationships. All of these singular voices swell to make demands or cry injustice, but also with a more personal intent, in “conversations with friends”1, about why we keep holding on, about things that knit and unravel, and that bear a resemblance or separate.
The artists who have responded to our invitation come from multiple backgrounds, and many of them live in France. We wanted to elicit a dialogue between them at different moments of their artist’s life, giving pride of place to emerging creators, who have only recently left their art school and are reaching out to the world.
An artist’s existence is often based on others’ attention and on the role and value that society bestows on the artist. This is a conviction I share with the Biennale de Lyon, which has been highlighting the subject of the link between the creative act and the audience for many years, and is now doing so in a sphere extended to include its territory, namely the Auvergne- Rhône-Alpes region.
In human and geographical situations, and in those of diverse productions, several artists have been invited to go and engage with people and know-how, which become sources of inspiration, of experimentation and of opportunities for co-creation.
In some cases, the resulting artworks will be produced in situ or in the exhibition venues, in a reciprocal two-way movement.
While otherness is sometimes a risk, we think it is a necessary risk, a chance for discovery. It is after all the spice of life. Rivers and streams convey these stories of exchanges and encounters, of rare commodities including salt, of conquests and discoveries, of dual histories where the relationship with the other can meander through twists and turns, from conflict and confrontation to convergence and confluence. We have to hope that where we end up is in a space for debate and self-invention, among other people and with other people.
—Alexia Fabre, guest curator
Exhibition venues:
— Grandes Locos
— Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie de Lyon – Grand Hôtel-Dieu
— macLYON – Musée d’art contemporain
— IAC – Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes
— Fondation Bullukian
— Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon
— Parking LPA Saint Antoine
— Station Métro B – Gare Part-Dieu
— Musée gallo-romain Saint-Romain-en-Gal
And more venues to come…
17th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art “Crossing the water”
until January 5, 2025