Biennale de Lyon / 14th Edition

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Oct 20, 2017 – Jan 7, 2018

Artpil

Thomas Teurlai

The Biennale de Lyon stems from a project by the Lyon’s Museum of Contemporary Art, directed by Thierry Raspail in 1984. Following the Paris Biennale’s closure in 1985 the Biennale proceeded by an annual event from 1984 – 1988 entitled October of the Arts. This event gave rise to the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art in 1991, which was inaugurated by the City of Lyon and the Ministry of Culture within the framework of decentralization, aiming to move the French Biennale of Contemporary Art outside Paris. Since 1991 the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art has been financed in equal parts by the City of Lyon and the French Ministry of Culture.

The organizational model of the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art is to create events of artistic self-renewal while also building a stable, long-term project, bonding with its host territory. For each edition the Artistic Director builds the event’s identity, choosing a curator or curatorial team to devise an artistic project in close collaboration. Each edition of the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art provides the opportunity to explore a specific theme such as, history, globalization and temporality.

Amélie Giacomini and Laura Sellies

Anne Le Troter

Laure Mary-Couégnias

Floating worlds / Emma Lavigne, Guest curator

Since its creation in 1991, Thierry Raspail, Artistic Director of the Biennale de Lyon, has asked each guest curator to think about a keyword, assigned for three editions. The 2017 Biennale de Lyon is the second volume of a trilogy around the word “modernity”, and it was with this word that Thierry Raspail invited Emma Lavigne, director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, to imagine this 14th edition, at the Sucrière and macLYON from September 20, 2017 to January 7, 2018.

“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.” –Charles Baudelaire

Exhibitions include artists works such as Robert Rauschenberg, Nairy Baghramian, Marcel Duchamp, and Camille Norment.

Hicham Berrada

Dia Mehta Bhupal

Rendez Vous / 20 Artists, 1 Graphic Designer, 10 International Biennials

Other programing highlights include Rendez Vous, resolutely devoted to showcasing young French and international creation. Rendez-vous is central to the 14th Biennale de Lyon and is a veritable “antechamber of expectation”. In the past it has exhibited–amongst others, and well before they took their place on the international scene–Thai artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul (winner of the Palme d’or at Cannes in 2010), British artist Ryan Gander, Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg (Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2009), and French artists Guillaume Leblon and Julien Prévieux (Marcel Duchamp Award, 2014), guests of the Biennale de Lyon in 2011 and 2015 respectively.

Created by the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon in 2002, Rendez-vous, an international platform for young creative artists with funding from the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region, uniquely in France, involves the combined energies of four separate institutions: the Biennale de Lyon; the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon, the Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes and the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon. Artistic direction of the event is shared by all four.

Among the many exhibiting artists include Anne Le Troter, Amélie Giacomini and Laura Sellies, Dia Mehta Bhupal, EJ Hill, Hicham Berrada, Laure Mary-Couégnias, Mitsunori Kimura, Nathalie Muchamad, Sinzo Aanza, Thomas Teurlai, and others.

In addition, to mark the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Centre Pompidou, famous masterpieces from their collection have been arrange to create a map for the Biennale de Lyon.