September 14–December 31, 2022
The accreditation form for the 16th Lyon Biennale’s professional preview days on September 12 and 13 is now available on the Biennale’s website. Accreditation will grant free entry into all of the Biennale’s 12 venues from September 12 until September 18. The Biennale opens to the public on September 14 and will be on view until December 31.
Curators: Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath
Titled manifesto of fragility, the Biennale will feature works of art and creative expression by 202 artists, some known and others anonymous, spanning two millennia. It draws from the collections and knowledge of the diverse museums of Lyon and its region, as well as from other specialized collections such as the American Art Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the vast holdings of the State Museums in Dresden, and the focused holdings of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The Biennale will be spread across 12 venues around the city, including several of its museums, as well as a thirty-thousand square meter disused factory (Usines Fagor), an abandoned 19th century natural history museum (Musée Guimet), and a pavilion from Lyon’s 1914 world fair. This will allow for an encounter with Lyon’s rich historical periods evident in its diverse architecture. In addition, several sites will be added to the Biennale’s parcours, where stories of fragility and resistance had taken place, and are embodied through components of art and architecture.
Stirred by the solidarity that underpins the collective authorship of a manifesto, the 16th Lyon Biennale calls upon us to reposition fragility at the heart of a new form of strength. Through word, image, sound, and movement, it re-imagines all forms of vulnerability, from the brittleness of our own bodies, to the precariousness of the entire planet and everything in between, as a conduit towards a more compassionate way of relating to our blamelessly fragile world.
The Biennale is structured around three concentric layers that function as focused points of entry into its themes of fragility and resistance. The first layer, titled The Many Lives and Deaths of Louise Brunet presents us with an exploration of fragility that is centered around the experience of one individual. Departing from a local Lyon connection, this is the obscure tale of Louise Brunet, a young woman who took part in the revolution of Lyon’s silk weavers (Les Canuts) in 1834, was sent to prison, to come out a few years later and find herself on a perilous journey to go work in one of the many Lyon-owned silk factories in Mount Lebanon. This micro-story serves as the foundation for an inventive take on fragility where the real, historical Louise Brunet is re-imagined as different individuals who lived in different times and in various places. Through more than 150 paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, books, and other creative works by 80 artists and creatives spanning two millennia, fiction and reality converge in a rewriting of this forgotten woman’s story, which then becomes a platform to delve into recurring forms of fragility comprising race, gender, mortality, and economy among many others.
From that micro-story of one individual in Lyon, the Biennale expands into its second concentrated layer: an example of fragility as experienced though one city, the city where Louise Brunet arrived around 1838: Beirut. Titled Beirut and the Golden Sixties, this part of the Biennale revisits a dazzling, yet disconcerting chapter from the development of modernism in Beirut that is set between the 1958 Lebanon crisis and the 1975 outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. With 34 artists, 230 artworks and around 300 archival documents, the exhibition sheds light on a fascinating, yet lesser-known episode from a period of prolific artistic production and political engagement in Beirut: a city of great dreams and many unfulfilled projects, whose insatiable appetite for life is matched only by the insurmountable burden of its irreconcilable ambitions. This focus on Beirut acquires added poignance in Lyon, given the two cities’ historical entanglements centred around the 19th century silk trade, and the establishment of the French Mandate in 1920 in Lebanon, which lasted until 1943, setting the stage for the period that this layer of the Biennale is concerned with.
From Beirut, the Biennale expands into the rest of the world to look into the complexities of fragility and resistance through a wide plethora of works by 88 contemporary artists from 39 countries, along with historical works by known and anonymous artists ranging from Roman sculpture and 19th century casts, to paintings from the middle ages until the 19th century. Titled A World of Endless Promise it collapses the axis of time to present a broad coalition of positions that partake in the building of a nuanced patchwork of narratives illuminating moments of resilience in the face of social, political and environmental upheaval. Spread across the Biennale’s twelve venues, it features more than 50 new commissions and tens of site-specific works that were adapted to the specificity of their locations. The artists gathered here embody various faces of fragility, some in the issues they tackle, and others in the materials they use. This makes for a timeless panorama that captures, through a diversity of voices, past and current moments of global perseverance, and proposes future forms of being in the world.
Discover the list of artists and more about the project here.
Accreditation
The accreditation for the professional preview days is strictly individual and valid for one person only. It entitles you to free admission to all the Biennale venues, as manifesto of fragility takes place at several venues and requires most possibly more than two days of visit. To be able to visit most of it at your own rhythm, your accreditation is valid from September 12 up to September 18 included.
You can accredit yourself at our Professionals area website.
The detailed schedule of the professional preview days, as well as of the opening week, will be available on our website by the end of August.
