Lyon Biennale, When Water Comes Together with Other Water, Fagor Factory, Lyon, France18 Sep 19 - 5 Jan 20
In 2019, the Lyon Contemporary Art Biennale is moving to the 29,000 sqm space of the former Fagor factory for the first time. This 15th edition is curated by the Palais de Tokyo, which has imagined the international exhibition as a vast landscape of uneven topography and unsettled climates.
Together the curators have envisioned this biennale as a vast ecosystem where artworks and artists cultivate the art of permaculture, at the intersection of landscapes be they biological (all interactions with living organisms, whether plants, animals or bacteria); economic (all interactions with resources and the appetites they entail: producing, distributing, consuming) and cosmogonic (all relations with the world’s spirit and our awareness of our place in the universe).
Around 50 artists of all generations and many nationalities, with gender parity, have been invited to make site-specific works that draw on the factory’s legacy and architecture as well as its own socio-economic context.
“Fantastic gardens, hybrid creatures, bouquets of epiphytic stories, synthetic fragrances and mythological machines, but also colours, crystals, songs and infrasounds which could be intended for us humans as much as for our contemporaries: plants, animals, minerals, breaths and chemistries, waves and bacteria, are just some of the ingredients that make up the porous landscapes of this 15th Lyon Biennale. This edition—a reflection of our collective curatorial approach, based on discussion and collegiality—seeks to nurture chance encounters and unexpected connections between artworks specially produced in collaboration with the vital forces of the metro area, the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region and the city of Lyon.”
Curatorial team.