A Terrible Beauty Is Born – 2011

A Terrible Beauty Is Born – 2011

Biennale de Lyon

February 12, 2011

Une Terrible Beauté Est Née /
A Terrible Beauty Is Born

15 September – 31 December 2011

Preview:
13-14 September 2011

www.labiennaledelyon.com/art

Curator: Victoria Noorthoorn
Artistic director: Thierry Raspail

The title of the next Biennale de Lyon, A Terrible Beauty Is Born, is a verse from the poem Easter, 1916 written by W.B. Yeats on September of that year on the uprising by which hundreds of Irish rebels claimed emancipation from the British. At first sight, the poem could be read as celebrating the martyrs that gave their life for the cause of independence. Yet upon further scrutiny, it becomes clear that the attitude of the speaker is one of perplexity and doubt. The poem shifts uneasily between affirmation, question and negation. It is, fundamentally, at war with itself.

As such, the title is more a methodological tool rather than a theme per se. It enables the project to explore the force of paradox and contradiction, tension and ambivalence, and to address the state of urgency in the world and in the arts today. Articulated through a series of parcours or narratives, the exhibition intends to address the density of the present as well as the power of the imaginary, the visionary and the hallucinatory.

As writer Carlos Gamerro states in his essay for the catalogue, “Yeats stood in the First World, and in the Third, in the centre and the periphery, he looked at the present from the past, and vice versa, and at the future from both. He stood high up in the mountain, looking down upon the Earth in flames; and also at the bottom of society, with the fools and the mad, as in his poems of Crazy Jane. Living, he looked on death, but also tried to look at life from death, addressing the passer by who stopped at his tomb: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!” (“Under Ben Bulben”). Again and again he strove in vain to achieve the perspective of God on human efforts and failures, a gaze under which all contradictions are resolved and all suffering explained, and as many times stepped down off this illusory perch in despair or disgust, only to try to climb again.”

The 11th Biennale de Lyon will include around 60 artists along the 150.000 square feet of its four venues: La Sucrière, the Bullukian Foundation, the Museum of contemporary art of Lyon, and the TASE factory. Its catalogue will be published by Les presses du réel.

Professional contact:
e-mail: pros@labiennaledelyon.com

Image above:
Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”—here directed by Krystian Lupa at the Teatro Lliure de Gràcia in Barcelona last December—is a reference for Robert Kusmirowski’s project for the 11th Biennale de Lyon in 2011. Photo: Rosa Ribas.

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