Fragility becomes strength at the Lyon Biennial

About the Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, which managed to overcome all the obstacles in order to be held from 14 September to 31 December in 11 venues in the metropolis.

The Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art does not hide its precariousness. Will this sixteenth edition be the last? The last to occupy the 29,000 m2 of the former Fagor-Brandt factories, which have been transformed into industrial wastelands, that's for sure. Because in addition to the 250,000 euros in subsidies from the Region that vanished in the middle of the event, forcing us to cut back on the scenography and certain features, the announcement by the Metropolis that the SNCF will take over this site in 2023 for the maintenance of the tramway is enough to worry the team of the Biennial for Contemporary Art. Its artistic director, Isabelle Bertolotti, knows that "we can always count on the Guimet Museum, but its surface area is barely one fifth of that of the Fagor factories. The Metropolis assures us that we will have a place, but we don't know which one it might be," she confided to the journalist from L'Oeil Magazine for its September issue. "For the time being, we are waiting.

All the more reason to rush to this 2022 edition of the Lyon Biennial, for which the duo of Lebanese and German curators, Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, have invited some 200 artists to mix eras and geographies to explore the fragilities of the contemporary world. By reflecting on the best way to forge new forms of resistance in the face of our collective vulnerabilities, "observed as much through the cycles of history as through the yardstick of our individual destinies or the state of our planet", as Anne-Cécile Sanchez explains in her article for the magazine Observateur de l'art. For what better theme could there be this year than fragility as a force? "Manifesto of Fragility" is indeed the title of the event, whose graphic design on a background of pink flowers is displayed on the poster created by the Safar design studio, a duo based between Beirut and Montreal. A real work of art in itself. Drawing inspiration from the Lyon herbarium as a bank of images and data, Safar's poster evokes both the botanical wealth of the city and the economy of the local silk industry, as well as the fleeting beauty of flowers, "capable, however, of crossing the ages pressed between two sheets of paper".

Since Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath decided to pool their networks in 2009, their curatorial platform artReoriented has collaborated with more than 70 institutions worldwide. In France, we can mention the event "Art et liberté", which challenged the canons of Western modernity at the Centre Pompidou in 2016 and, according to L'Oeil, allowed a new chapter to be written in the history of art. For their passion and speciality is to decompartmentalise the way in which art is viewed. Just as they saw John Berger do in his 1970s series Ways of Seeing, a classic of visual analysis that can still be devoured on the Internet today. The pair also chaired the Montblanc Cultural Foundation from 2016 to 2020, before taking over as directors of the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin in January 2022. Appointed curators of the Lyon Biennale in 2019, they are also curators of the French pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, entrusted this year to Zineb Sedira.

With the help of a researcher, and with the aim of structuring the 16th Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art around three concentric sections functioning as entry points into the proposed theme, the two curators have immersed themselves in the history of the city of Lyon to unearth the strange journey of Louise Brunet, the militant worker sent to the silk factories in Lebanon and who today serves as the nucleus of the Biennial's first section. Presented on the first floor of the macLYON, the exhibition "The Many Lives and Deaths of Louise Brunet" brings together several hundred works of art, objects and archive documents spanning several millennia. From Lucas Cranach to the industrial design of the 1960s, from Roman funerary steles to Japanese samurai armour, from Ann Agee's polychrome ceramic Madonnas proposing an alternative to medieval statuary with a child who could be a girl, to Phoebe Boswell's work evoking the representation of race in Othello, She draws on the collections of local and foreign institutions such as the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lugdunum - Musée et Théâtres romains and Gadagne in Lyon, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Louvre Abu Dhabu or the Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden, to unearth transhistorical narratives of fragility and resistance.

The exhibition "Beirut and the Golden Sixties" rebounds on the city where Louise Brunet arrived in 1838, and this second section presents a pivotal moment in modern history from the perspective of an ongoing crisis, highlighting the entanglement of past and present cycles of fragility and resistance. With more than 230 works of art by 34 artists, mainly modern, and 300 archival documents from more than 40 private collections, this second part of the 16th Lyon Biennial, organised with the Gropius Bau in Berlin and which has largely benefited from the support of the Lebanese diaspora, offers the opportunity to discover the new perspectives offered to this city still burdened by the weight of its irreconcilable ambitions. And to see or re-see Etel Adnan's paintings recently discovered at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, but also those of Khalil Zgaib or Paul Guiragossian, among many others.

Finally, with the third part of this narrative, entitled "A world of infinite promise", an international network is taking shape on the eleven exhibition sites of the Lyon Biennial, spread throughout the Metropolis, from Amsterdam to Warsaw, from Bogota to Shanghai or from Paris to Marseilles, via Lyon.

From the former Fagor factories to the Fourvière Museum of Sacred Art, via the Guimet Museum, which is reopening to the public for the first time since its closure in 2007, and which is hosting works created especially for the occasion by the young and talented artists Ugo Schiavi and Lucile Boiron, the macLYON and Lugdunum of course, the garden of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Ceysson & Bénétière art gallery... but also the LPA car parks which, for the past thirty years, have been home to some of the great names in contemporary art in their basements. This is a great opportunity to take stock of the progress of the work of today's artists, as enthusiastic as Aurélie Pétrel and her "photographic scores", or Eva Nielsen and her "precipitated views", inspired as much by Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels as by Rauschenberg's Combines or Gordon Matta Clark's cut-outs of the buildings. Not forgetting the impressive installation of monumental sculptures by Daniel Otera Torres, the paintings of Julio Anaya Cabanding, the narrative paintings of Sylvie Selig, the musical work of Annika Kahrs...

Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath had the intention of broadening the notion of contemporaneity by creating "confrontations, visual, formal and thematic dialogues, notably through the display of old and new works in the same space". It's a success!