September 14, 2022 – December 31, 2022
The Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art is pleased to announce its 16th edition. Conceived by curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath as a Manifesto of Fragility, the Biennale positions fragility at the heart of a generative form of resistance that is emboldened by the past, responsive to the present, and primed for the future.
The 16th Lyon Biennale elevates its perspective to a metahistorical panorama through significant loans from from many of Lyon’s leading cultural institutions, such as the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, the Lugdunum Museum and Roman theatres, the Musée des Confluences and Gadagne.
With the conviction that dialogue is crucial for a more equitable and sustainable future, the Biennale will begin to unfold several months before the September 2022 opening in Lyon through collaborations with several partnering institutions in cities internationally that will continue until the end of 2023.
Amongst these events, on October 1st 2021, one year before its official opening and as a preamble to its 16th edition, the curators invite Sasso, a Lyon-based rapper, for a free showcase open to all in the heart of the Fagor Factories. A starting point of a long-term project initiated by one of the Biennale’s guest artists, this illustrates the curators’ desire to work over the course of time in the territory through all forms of artistic expression, without borders between generations, institutions and practices.
LYON
The 16th edition of the Biennale takes cues from Lyon’s
complexly layered histories. Rising from the foundations
of Lugdunum, on the echoes of Napoleon’s declaration
of love to the Lyonnais, out of the flickering images of the
Lumière brothers’ actualités, and from the obscure tale
of Louise Brunet’s perilous journey to the silk factories
of Mount Lebanon, the destiny of Lyon is marked by
the particularities of its people and the traces of their
experiences that enrich the lives of those who come to
know the city today. The 16th Lyon Biennale invokes
these histories to inform an exploration of fragility that
searches for connections beyond the limits of geography
FRAGILITY
Our fragility is perhaps one of few universally felt truths
in our divided world. Nowhere is this more apparent than
on and within the body. Racialized, gendered, colonized,
or depleted, the body is the first of many thresholds
where conflict rages and resolves, illness festers and
abates, and life in all of its complexity, at least in some
sense, begins and ends. Our communities, strained by
increasing civil unrest sparked by refusals to bow down
to age-old injustices and endemic inequities, provoke
in their fragility an enhanced sense of societal frenzy.
Whether in the bruised body of a protestor or the ashen
skies over the earth’s inflamed surface, our awareness of
our shared precariousness has rarely been more tangible
or visible. Our fragility is inevitable.
RESISTANCE
The 16th Lyon Biennale assembles a host of creative
practices and objects that variously speak to the
vulnerabilities of people and places. What would become
of our world, the Biennale seeks to ask, if instead of
shunning vulnerability as a sign of weakness, we were to
harness it as a foundation for empowerment?
In this revised script, true power moves not to conquer
new frontiers but rather to continue on a march towards
a home that is carried within. The Biennale presents a
collective statement buttressed by a plurality of resilient
voices thriving on tenderness and flourishing in adversity.
A community forms where word, image, sound, and
movement come together, culminating in the drafting of a
manifesto for a world that is blamelessly fragile.
TIME
The 16th Lyon Biennale recognizes that artists, past and
present, are often among the most vulnerable voices in our
societies. Museums and libraries bequeath the perishable
testimonies of their work to future generations in the hope
that their legacies outlast our own mortality. By the same
token, we are enchanted by novelty, so much so that we
risk losing our appreciation for the contemporaneity of all
art. In addressing these contradictory impulses, the 16th
Lyon Biennale brings together works of art and objects
spanning millennia and disparate geographies that impart
enduring accounts of vulnerability and perseverance,
bare their scars and deformities, share witness accounts
of turmoil, or simply draw attention to the indelible traces
of time. With access to the vast collections of museums in
Lyon and beyond, the Biennale initiates a revised reading
of diverse works and the narratives they embody.
Eternally cyclical, our fragility repeatedly rises to the fore, stares us in the face, and then seemingly disappears, while it lingers on underneath time’s thick skin, dormant yet not gone, silent but never silenced.