The 17th Lyon Biennale continues to establish itself on the contemporary art scene, and this year it resonates with "the voices of rivers" thanks to 80 artists from around the world. A closer look at some of the installations.

Lyon is particularly renowned for its rich cultural, artistic, and cinematic heritage, including the iconic Festival of Lights, the Lumière Festival dedicated to the history of cinema, and the Nuits Sonores music festival. But it also boasts its 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 by Thierry Raspail, artistic director and former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon (macLYON), and Thierry Prat, artistic director. Since then, this major event, alternating with the Dance Biennale, launched in 1984, has set the city's heart 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 leading figures in the art world will enliven the city for four months. For this 17th edition, entitled "The Voices of Rivers / Crossing the Water," the curatorial team is led by Alexia Fabre, director of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, and Isabelle Bertolotti, artistic director. They have chosen to focus the program on the values ​​of altruism and welcoming others. Thus, the artists' works "evoke, question, and explore the relationships that form and dissolve between people and their environment." This journey extends along the Rhône River and across more than fifteen areas of the region, "like a metaphor for all the waters that converge to form a stronger current."

NEW PLACES

It is in a place steeped in history that the Biennale invites young creators to exhibit their works, which address contemporary issues. The former Fagor factories, host to the two previous editions, have given way to Les Grandes Locos in La Mulatière. This complex of industrial buildings, inaugurated in 1846, became a SNCF (French National Railways) technical center in the 20th century and a testament to the history of the French railway. After two years of renovations, it has now been transformed into a spectacular cultural venue, which opened its doors for the Nuits Sonores festival last May. The Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie (International City of Gastronomy), located in the Grand Hôtel-Dieu, is also among the Biennale's new venues, joining the usual dedicated institutions such as the macLYON, the Institut d'art contemporain de Villeurbanne (IAC), the Fondation Bullukian, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts (Museum of Fine Arts).

IN THE MIRROR, BY CHANTAL AKERMAN

In the spotlight of 2024, Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) remains one of the most audacious filmmakers, writers, actresses, and artists of her generation. Her creations, blending fiction, documentary, experimental film, and cinematic essay, continue to grace cinemas and be exhibited in museums. Capricci Editions is notably offering, for the first time, a boxed set of nearly her entire body of work, as well as a retrospective on September 25 at the La Rochelle Film Festival. Throughout her lifetime, her multifaceted vision consistently explored questions of borders, displacement, and identity, drawing upon the possibilities offered by image, time, space, and performance. This is what the video installation In the Mirror, taken from a scene in her medium-length film The Beloved Child or I Play at Being a Married Woman (1971), reminds us of. “The work explores the question of the relationship with oneself and the gaze of others, revealing the gender and beauty norms that govern the perception of one's physical appearance,” emphasizes curator Alexia Fabre. “With its great formal simplicity, the black and white projection confronts the audience with its own image, through 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). Life, death, childhood, memory, and the unconscious are among his recurring themes, which he intertwines through various means of expression, including videos and archival images, clothing and textiles, and plays of light and shadow. For the Biennale, the curator highlights his installation Animitas (“white”), which connects the artist’s personal history to that of the spaces that host it. Here, Boltanski creates memorials for the living and the dead and evokes ancestral rites. “It features 800 Japanese bells swaying in the wind, whose tinkling evokes the music of the stars and the voices of floating souls. Fixed to the ground, they trace the celestial map of the artist’s birth date, September 6, 1944,” explains the curator. This project, filmed in a single, fixed shot from sunrise to sunset, is conceived as an invitation to meditation and reflection on the cycles of life. It was launched in 2014 in the Atacama Desert in Chile and continued on Île d'Orléans in Quebec in 2017.

YANGTZE RIVER PROJECT, BY NADAV KANDER

The photographer, born in Tel Aviv and having lived in Johannesburg before settling in London, explores the human condition in all its facets. Nadav Kander is known for his portraits of figures from the worlds of art, sports, and politics, such 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 also the guest of honor at the 12th edition of the Portrait(s) festival in Vichy. For the Lyon Biennale, he presented his series on the Yangtze River, which flows 6,500 kilometers from west to east across China. "With the river as a metaphor for constant change, I photographed the landscape and the people along its banks from its mouth to its source," explains Nadav Kander. The photograph Chongqing IV (Sunday Picnic) shows a family continuing to live amidst the rubble of demolished homes. "My own sense of uprootedness as a South African born in Israel and living in England provoked a strong reaction when I witnessed the scale of the changes taking place in China," he forcefully states in his argument.

SOMA, BY CLARA LEMERCIER GEMPTEL

The artist, a visual artist and videographer originally from Rouen and based in Lille, draws inspiration from horror cinema in her film work, which probes the human body. Clara Lemercier Gemptel reappropriates cinematic codes and aesthetic norms to question the power dynamics and domination that shape the representation of individuality on screen. She also uses them to explore the possibility of otherness in cinema. Her video installation, SOMA, takes over the cultural space of Les Grandes Locos, giving voice to managers, nurses, insurance agents, and salespeople. Amid the din of machinery, these individuals describe the various violent mechanisms at work that have led them to develop symptoms of physical and psychological suffering. Through her camera, which infiltrates the labyrinthine, deserted corridors, white silhouettes attempt to give form to these anonymous voices.

ROOMS, BY MATHIEU PERNOT

The photographer from Fréjus, now based in Paris, offers a perspective that is both documentary and narrative, exploring modes of representation. His series resonate with one another through characters, chronologies, themes, and archival images. Mathieu Pernot is exhibiting his project Chambres (Rooms), created in Barcelona, ​​Béthune, and Gennevilliers between 2001 and 2007, in apartments emptied of their occupants shortly before the buildings were demolished. His photograph Intérieurs, Gennevilliers (Interiors, Gennevilliers) shows the only remaining vestige of the inhabitants' private living spaces: peeling and torn wallpaper depicting a nighttime view of Manhattan in New York. Mathieu Pernot's work thus questions photography's capacity to preserve memory and grasp 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 intersection of photography, performance, and video. Elsa Parra and Johanna Benaïnous create visual and fictional narratives in which they are the sole performers. Through observation and interaction, they playfully reproduce the attitudes, gestures, and expressions of strangers in staged and disguised portraits. The duo presents here the series Beyond the Shadows, which they created between 2018 and 2019 in Calgary, in southwestern Canada. Using autofiction, they explore self-representation and the construction of identity by reenacting the ordinary and fictional lives of anonymous individuals in scenes of life and intimate, social, and poetic stories.

ALTERSCAPES: PLAYGROUND, BY OTOBONG NKANGA

Originally from Nigeria and now based in Antwerp, Otobong Nkanga explores the concept of territory and the value placed on natural resources. This visual artist uses her body to convey her ideas through performances, drawings, sculptures, paintings, photographs, and installations. She creates narratives that delve into memory, the natural environment, and postcolonial histories rooted in her country of origin. By exploring the idea of ​​land as a place of non-belonging, she seeks to offer an alternative meaning to various social and identity-based perspectives. In her series Alterscapes: Playground, she stages herself in front of a model landscape, physically merging with the environment. Through this succession of images, she addresses the traumas that affect territories, while attempting to repair life through her actions.

WELCOME TO THE PLASTIC AGE, BY INES KATAMSO

The Franco-Indonesian artist, based in Bali, draws on her multicultural heritage to create enduring works that celebrate life and nature, while also exploring contemporary issues such as the pollution of natural spaces. Her study of microorganisms and fossils questions the harmony of the environment and reconsiders the concept of human life. To achieve this, Ines Katamso adopts a perspective that is both scientific and spiritual, reinterpreting traditional craft techniques using recycled materials. Her installation, Welcome to the Plastic Age, is inspired by the latest scientific discoveries and aims to demonstrate how nanoplastics infiltrate bodies and organisms. "In this new era, humankind has produced so much plastic that the material is not only omnipresent in our daily lives, it makes up our bodies, flora, and landscapes," she emphasizes. Minerals, plants, and animals thus become hybrid entities, simultaneously organic and plastic, traditional and futuristic.

THE LYON CONTEMPORARY ART BIENNIAL
FROM SEPTEMBER 21, 2024 TO JANUARY 5, 2025
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