Lyon Biennial

La 17^e édition de la Biennale de Lyon vient d’ouvrir ses portes. Une des principales manifestations de l’art contemporain en France et en Europe, par le nombre de visiteurs, le rayonnement de l’événement, le nombre d’artistes invités, mais aussi par la taille des espaces investis – le gigantisme des Grandes Locos, anciennes usines de réparation de locomotives, pourrait presque faire passer l’ancienne usine Fagor délaissée et ses 8 000 m² pour un run space… – s’apprête à recevoir le flot de ses visiteurs. Cette année, le commissariat a été confié à Alexia Fabre, qui, après avoir dirigé pendant des années le MacVal à Vitry, a récemment pris la direction de l’École des beaux-arts de Paris. Le titre de la biennale, Les voix des fleuves, laissait présager une manifestation où l’attention se porterait a priori sur l’identité des « sujets naturels », dans l’esprit d’un Camille de Toledo et de son parlement de la Loire. Mais cette édition réfère plus, selon les intentions de sa curatrice, à la géographie de la ville et à la proximité des lieux de la biennale avec le fleuve, d’où émaneraient les vibrations et les chants censés influer (positivement) sur notre humeur. Une chose est sûre : l’attention portée à autrui et les relations interpersonnelles sont au cœur d’une biennale qui cherche à montrer comment les récents bouleversements (sociétaux, géopolitiques) ont impacté le moral des humains et comment l’art s’empare de ces interrogations, à défaut d’y apporter des solutions. 

When we entered the biennial’s main site, the Grandes Locos, we were overwhelmed by a sense of crush and déjà vu: that of concrete cathedrals destined to be reinvested by a less polluting industry, that of culture. The works by Quebec artist Michel de Broin – highlighted with string lights and hastily applied sealants on the hall’s ceilings – bear witness to the end of a once flourishing industrial activity and the concomitant disappearance of a hard-working population steeped in a rich history. In the same vein, Pavel Büchler’s piece, which brings a joyful hubbub to the impressive refectory with its countless washbasins, underlines the ghostly character of premises that we once imagined rustling with a thousand sounds. 

The gigantic scale of the site, combined with the ‘archipelagic’ nature of the works, creates a sense of floating, further accentuated by the claimed lack of authoritarianism on the part of the curator, who has preferred horizontality and fluidity to the assertive verticality of the gestures. It’s hard to escape the repertoire that runs through the many subsections of the theme: from the phenomenon of invisibility of black actors in cinema (Jérémie Danon & Kiddy Smile), in a joyful video that is free of radical protest but deliciously ironic (RIDE, 2024), to Nefeli Papadimouli’s ‘passage en textile’, which struggles to renew the experiments of Franz Erhard Walter ; from Iván Argote’s work (Un chemin commun, 2024), which is a little gentle and urges us to take each other by the hand, to Julien Discrit’s installation, which proposes to revisit the approach to Alzheimer’s disease through a subtle immersion in memory rather than the usual violence of hospital treatment (Forever Reverb). The general ambience of this first site, filled with works that celebrate attentive postures – sometimes quite literal (coat 4 by Liesl Raff) – is not always so ‘care-ssing’, however, and allows the disappointing messages of a Nathan Coley (There will be no miracles) to flicker through. But it’s the more offbeat works that leave the most lasting impressions, like Hans Schabus’s interminable wooden tunnel that teleports us from one side of the Grands Locos to the other, or Jean-Christophe Norman’s magnificent pictorial installation, a transposition in so many micro-paintings of the thousand pages of Hans Henny Jahnn’s whirlwind novel. Argote’s oversized swing (The others, we and the others, 2023), which returns to his penchant for the absurd and his gentle critique of human relationships, is our favourite, as is the video by Lithuanian Andrius Arutiunian, which follows in the footsteps of Michael Snow by creating an undeniable island of temporal suspension. The second site of the Grandes Locos is largely dominated by the impressive work of Oliver Beer: the highlight of this biennial leaves aside the banners of Jeremy Deller, as well as the work of Seulgi Lee, which would have deserved more visibility. But it has to be said that the British artist’s multiprojection leaves us in awe of an immersive installation with perfectly mastered acoustics. It envelops us in the voices recorded in the Palaeolithic caves where the artist asked eight performers to sing the songs that marked their childhood, plunging us into a sonic and visual universe that resonates with architecture and music, memory and history.

In fact, as the curator suggested during her presentation, the Grandes Locos and the Cité de la Gastronomie – another of the biennial’s new sites – were home to works that could be described as benevolent and ‘restorative’, while the Mac presented works that were more tense, bearing witness to the darker side of human relationships. At the museum, the visit begins with the screening of an extract from Chantal Akerman’s film (In the mirror), in which the nude female character contemplates her body and wonders about her figure. The tone is set by the filmmaker, who expresses all the anxiety that physical appearance can generate: the issues of self-acceptance and relationships with others are masterfully condensed into a single sequence shot. We then move on to a room dedicated to the regretted Sylvie Fanchon, whose minimalist canvases, weighted down with inscriptions, resonate with a troubled age when technology seems to offer no guarantee of social progress.

Omer Fast’s films, Tirdad Hashemi & Sofiane Erfanian’s drawings, and Taysir Batniji’s installation, each in their own way, heighten this sense of living in uncertain times when wars seem to have no end and inhumanity to develop accordingly. As for interpersonal relationships, Lorraine de Sagazan and Tohé Commaret paint a portrait of a world still marked by male domination and the objectification of bodies. Grace Ndiritu’s monumental installation contradicts this pessimistic vision, restoring a little hope and a place for women in an art history that has largely ignored them, as do the works on display at the new Cité de la Gastronomie site, which create a much more optimistic, if somewhat more literal, atmosphere (Guadalupe Maravilla), preferring the organic, more polysemous forms of Hajar Satari.

Head image : Hans Schabus, Monument for People on the Move, 2024. Bois, fonte d’aluminium. Courtesy de l’artiste. Création pour la 17e Biennale de Lyon. © ADAGP, Paris, 2024. Photo Jair Lanes”

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• By the same author: Anozero' 24, Coimbra Biennal, Signs and Objects. Pop art from the Guggenheim Collection at Guggenheim Museum, Momentum 12 at Moss, Yayoi Kusama : 1945 to Now at Guggenheim Bilbao, Thomas Demand,