The 17th edition of the Biennale de Lyon continues to make its mark on the contemporary art scene, this year echoing "the voices of rivers" thanks to 80 artists from all over the world. Here's a closer look at some of the installations.

Lyon is particularly well known for its cultural, artistic and cinematographic wealth, such as the emblematic Fête des Lumières, the Festival Lumière dedicated to the history of cinema, and the Nuits sonores. But there's also the Biennale. For thirty years, contemporary art has held a prominent place in this metropolis of the Rhône-Alpes region. The event was launched in 1991 under the impetus of Thierry Raspail, artistic director and former director of the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon (macLYON), and Thierry Prat, artistic director. Since then, this major event, alternating with the Biennale de la danse, launched in 1984, has set the heart of the city beating to the rhythm of contemporary creation.

ODE TO OTHERNESS

Chantal Akerman, Christian Boltanski, Clara Lemercier Gemptel, Mathieu Pernot, Nadav Kander, Annette Messager, Agnès Gayraud, Otobong Nkanga, Jesper Just, Hélène Delprat and many other big names from the world of the arts enliven the city for four months. For this 17th edition, christened "Les voix des fleuves / Crossing the water", curation is led by Alexia Fabre, Director of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, and Isabelle Bertolotti, Artistic Director. Both have chosen to focus the program on the values of altruism and welcoming others. As such, the artists' works "evoke, question and pursue the relationships that develop and dissolve between human beings and their environment". The route stretches along the Rhône and over fifteen regional territories, "like a metaphor for all the waters that come together to form a stronger current".

NEW PLACES

The Biennial invites young designers to showcase their work in a venue steeped in history, and focused on today's issues. The former Fagor factories of the two previous editions are giving way to the Grandes Locos in La Mulatière. This complex of industrial buildings, inaugurated in 1846, became an SNCF technicenter in the 20th century, bearing witness to the history of the French railroads. After two years of renovation, it has now been converted into a spectacular cultural venue, which opened its doors to the Nuits Sonores festival last May. The Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie, located in the Grand Hôtel-Dieu, is also one of the Biennale's new addresses, joining the usual dedicated institutions such as macLYON, the Institut d'art contemporain de Villeurbanne (IAC), the Fondation Bullukian and the Musée des Beaux-Arts.

IN THE MIRROR, BY CHANTAL AKERMAN

In the spotlight in 2024, Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) remains one of the most daring filmmakers, writers, actors and artists of her generation. Her creations, which combine fiction, documentary, experimental film and cinematographic essay, are constantly being shown in cinemas and museums. For the first time, Capricci is offering a boxed set of almost all his work, as well as a retrospective at the La Rochelle Film Festival on September 25. Throughout his lifetime, his multi-faceted vision has probed questions of borders, displacement and identity, drawing on the possibilities offered by image, time, space and performance. The video installation In the Mirror, taken from a scene in his medium-length film L'enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée (1971), reminds us of this. "The work explores the question of one's relationship to oneself and the gaze of others, and reveals the gender and beauty norms that govern the perception of one's physical appearance," points out curator Alexia Fabre. "The simple black-and-white projection confronts the audience with its own image, based on a play of reflections between the mirror and the screen.

ANIMITAS, BY CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI

Another influential figure in contemporary art is Christian Boltanski (1944-2021). His favorite themes include life, death, childhood, memory and the unconscious, which he interweaves in a variety of media, including video and archival images, clothing and textiles, and light and shadow. For the Biennale, the curator is highlighting his installation Animitas ("white"), which combines the artist's personal history with that of the places that host it. Here, Boltanski creates memorials for the living and the dead, invoking ancestral rites. "She shows 800 Japanese bells swaying in the wind, their tinkling evoking the music of the stars and the voices of floating souls. Fixed to the floor, they draw the celestial map of the day the artist was born, September 6, 1944", says the curator. This concept, filmed in a fixed shot from sunrise to sunset, is conceived as an invitation to meditation and a reflection on the cycles of life. It was inaugurated in 2014 in Chile's Atacama Desert and continued on Quebec's Île d'Orléans in 2017.

YANGTZE RIVER PROJECT, BY NADAV KANDER

The Tel Aviv-born photographer, who lived in Johannesburg before settling in London, explores the human condition in all its facets. Nadav Kander is known for his portraits of personalities from the worlds of art, sport and politics, as in his series Obama's People, but also for his work on the remnants of the Cold War on the border between Kazakhstan and Russia. In 2024, he was guest of honor at the 12th Portrait(s) festival in Vichy. For the Lyon Biennial, he presents his series on the Yangtze River, which crosses China from west to east over 6,500 kilometers. "Using the river as a metaphor for constant change, I photographed the landscape and people along its banks, from mouth to source," explains Nadav Kander. The shot Chongqing IV (Sunday Picnic) shows a family continuing to live on the rubble of demolished dwellings. "My own sense of uprootedness as an Israeli-born South African living in England elicited a strong reaction when I witnessed the scale of the changes underway in China," he states forcefully in his argument.

SOMA, BY CLARA LEMERCIER GEMPTEL

Clara Lemercier Gemptel, a visual artist and video-maker based in Lille, France, originally from Rouen, France, draws on horror cinema in her film work, which probes the human body. Clara Lemercier Gemptel reappropriates cinematographic codes and aesthetic standards to question the relationships of power and domination that condition the representation of individuality in the image. But also to demonstrate the possibility of otherness in cinema. His video installation SOMA takes over the Grandes Locos cultural space, giving a voice to executives, nurses, insurers and salespeople. Amid the din of machines, the protagonists describe the various violent mechanisms at work that have led them to develop symptoms of physical and psychological suffering. As the camera wanders through the labyrinthine aisles devoid of human presence, white silhouettes attempt to give body to these anonymous voices.

ROOMS, BY MATHIEU PERNOT

The Paris-based photographer from Fréjus offers both a documentary and narrative approach, exploring modes of representation. His series resonate with each other through characters, chronologies, themes and archival images. Mathieu Pernot is exhibiting his Chambres project, carried out in Barcelona, Béthune and Gennevilliers between 2001 and 2007, in apartments emptied of their occupants shortly before the building was demolished. His photograph Intérieurs, Gennevilliers shows the only thing left of the intimacy of the inhabitants' living environment: the wallpaper, peeled off and torn, depicting a night view of Manhattan in New York. Mathieu Pernot's work questions photography's ability to preserve memory and apprehend reality.

BEYOND THE SHADOWS, BY ELSA & JOHANNA

The two artists, born in Bayonne and based in Paris, have been working together since 2014, at the crossroads of photography, performance and video. Elsa Parra and Johanna Benaïnous create visual and fictional narratives in which they are the sole performers. In a game of observation and interaction, they playfully reproduce the attitudes, gestures and expressions of strangers in staged, transvestite portraits. Here, the duo present the Beyond the Shadows series they created between 2018 and 2019 in Calgary, in southwestern Canada. Using autofiction, they probe self-representation and the construction of identity by re-enacting the ordinary and fictional lives of anonymous people in intimate, social and poetic life scenes and stories.

ALTERSCAPES: PLAYGROUND, BY OTOBONG NKANGA

Otobong Nkanga, originally from Nigeria and now based in Antwerp, questions the notion of territory and the value placed on natural resources. The visual artist uses her body to convey her ideas through performances, drawings, sculptures, paintings, photographs and installations. In so doing, she creates narratives that focus on memory, the natural environment and post-colonial histories rooted in her homeland. By exploring the idea of the land as a place of non-membership, she aims to give alternative meaning to various social and identity-related thoughts. In her series Alterscapes: Playground, she stages herself in front of a model landscape, physically merging with the environment. With this succession of images, she addresses the traumas that affect territories, while attempting to repair the living through her gestures.

WELCOME TO THE PLASTIC AGE, BY INES KATAMSO

The Bali-based Franco-Indonesian artist draws on her multicultural heritage to create sustainable works that celebrate life and nature, while probing contemporary issues such as the pollution of natural spaces. Her study of micro-organisms and fossils questions the harmony of the environment and reconsiders the concept of human life. To do this, Ines Katamso draws on both a scientific and spiritual perspective, reinvesting craft techniques with recycled materials. Her installation Welcome to the Plastic Age is inspired by the latest scientific discoveries, and aims to show how nanoplastics infiltrate bodies and organisms. "In this new era, human beings have produced so much plastic that the material is no longer just omnipresent in our daily lives, but is also part of our bodies, flora and landforms," she points out. Minerals, plants and animals thus become hybrid entities, both organic and plastic, traditional and futuristic.

LA BIENNALE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN DE LYON
FROM SEPTEMBER 21 2024 TO JANUARY 5 2025
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