Confinement, isolation, uprooting, destitution, disruption, disorientation, wandering, fears…: the list of ills plaguing our world, gripped by doubt and anxiety, is endless. From the ravages of war to political lies, from climate change to pandemic cycles, the 200 artists gathered at the 16e Lyon Contemporary Art Biennale (deployed across 12 locations) review the torments and disenchantments of our time to reveal the vulnerability of beings and places, their wounds, but also the resilience of individuals and peoples who have suffered and the strategies they have developed to resist and invent "future forms of being in the world." A "Manifesto of Fragility" whose strengths and weaknesses we have identified in five keywords.
GREY
Like the monochrome portraits of Giulia Andreani and the buried worlds of Hans Op de Beeck. Composed from old photographs or screenshots from films and documentaries, Payne's portraits painted in grey Julia Andreani (born in 1985 in Venice) evoke the erasure of memory, "forgotten stories, buried narratives." Similarly, the gigantic immersive installation resembling a ghost town of Hans Op de Beeck (born in 1969 in Belgium), We were the last to stayLike a giant memento mori, this abandoned campsite frozen in a sheath of grey paint reminds us of the irremediable passage of time and the vanity of human existence (“[…] dust […] to dust you shall return.”).
RUINS
Explosion, flood, collapse… Ghostly images captured at the Sursock Museum during the August 4, 2020 explosion that destroyed a third of Beirut in a fraction of a second (video installation by Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige) to the hypnotic and electromagnetic labyrinth ofEvita Vasiljevaleading us to the contemplation of a gaping wall… passing by the clumps of asbestos fibers scattered under the collapsed roof of the old abandoned chalet-restaurant in the Parc de la Tête d'Or, occupied by Nina Beer…, ruin is one of the most recurring leitmotifs of this Biennale. From coal landslides burying the faces in old photographs to other off-frame spills of crumpled, burnt papers Lucia Tallova respond the stained photographs of Munem Wasif.To Floating ruins de Clemens Behr probing the fragile utopias of brutalist architecture – built for eternity on the promise of "a better world" – are echoed the woven architectural ruins, composed from digital collages, of Ailbhe Ní BhriainTapestry is also used, among other means of expression.Markus Schinwald for its Panorama chaos: a fantastic field of ruins unfolding like a mural, the setting for a funereal theatre of memory, embellished with crossed-out paintings, a mutilated antique bust and casts of broken faces…
WRINKLES
In a disturbing choreographic installation that gives the video screen the appearance of a tomb, it is the ruin of the body that is staged Omar Rajeh & Mia Habis in a magnificent allegory of old age entitled Walking in wrinkles Following in close-up the slow movements of the truncated body of a centenarian dancer (George Macbriar) projected in a mobile box, the camera takes us on a journey through the wrinkles and the withering of skin that already seemed almost dead…
PROSTHESES
Stone ruins, bodily ruins… From these stagings of fragility arise a proliferation of prostheses and other devices hybridizing the living and the machine in dystopian spaces, a kind of non-place or suspended space, petrified or in the process of becoming, post-human. Thus, environments sparsely dotted with pipes and giant epoxy skins inlaid with embroidery of Klara HosnedlováHaunted by strange, armored “creatures” (in prosthetics and rags) during performances, these highly organic stagings of space evoke less disappearance than mutation. Similarly, the film installations and biomorphic sculptures of WangShui, which shows here "an otherworldly landscape" co-written with artificial intelligence, in order to explore the entanglement of human consciousness and machine.
METAMORPHISMS
Techno-archaeological amalgams resulting from the concretion of computer remains (motherboards, hard drives, processors, etc.) melted in artificial lava, the pieces of the series Metamorphism de Julian Charriere proceed from this same hybridization. As do the strange germinations of cables and plants in the immense science-fiction landscape deployed by Ugo Schiavi in the former Natural History Museum (Guimet Museum), now an abandoned data center. Mixing plants, fossils, and bones with human waste (modeled and projected in 3D), this Grafted Memory System plunges us into a disturbing "archaeology of the future".
16e Lyon Biennial
Until December 31