PARCOURS : XVIth BIENNIAL OF LYON, MANIFESTO OF FRAGILITY

Enclosure, confinement, isolation, uprooting, destitution, disruptions, wanderings, fears…: the record of evils of our world in the grip of doubt and nervousness is countless. From the ravages of conflict to political lies, from international warming to pandemic cycles, the 200 artists gathered at the 16th Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art (unfold over twelve venues) evaluate the torments and disenchantments of our time to point out the vulnerability of beings and locations, their wounds, but in addition the resilience of bruised beings and peoples and their strategies developed to withstand and invent “future types of being on the planet. A Manifesto of Fragility whose strains of pressure and fault strains we've recognized in five key words.

GREY

Just like the monochrome portraits of Giulia Andreani and the buried worlds of Hans Op de Beeck. Composed from previous pictures or display captures of films and documentaries, the portraits painted in Payne grey by Giulia Andreani (born in 1985 in Venice) evoke the erasure of memory, “forgotten stories, buried narratives.” As well as the large immersive installation with the appearance of a ghost city by Hans Op de Beeck (born in 1969 in Belgium), We have been the last to stay. Like an enormous memento mori, this abandoned campsite frozen in a gangue of grey paint reminds us of the irretrievable flight of time and the vainness of human existence (“Dust you'll turn into mud again…”).

RUINS

Explosion, flood, collapse… From the ghostly pictures captured within the Sursock Museum through the explosion of August 4, 2020 which destroyed in a fraction of a second a third of Beirut (video set up by Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige) to the hypnotic and electro-magnetic labyrinth of Evita Vasiljeva leading us to the contemplation of a disemboweled wall… The wreck is likely one of the most recurrent leitmotivs of this Biennial, from the bouquets of asbestos fibers sown underneath the damaged roof of the previous deserted chalet-restaurant within the Parc de la Tête d’Or, invested by Nina Beier. To the collapses of coal burying the faces of previous pictures and different off-frame spills of crumpled, burned papers… by Lucia Tallova answer the stained pictures of Munen Wasif. Clemens Behr’s floating ruins, probing the fragile utopias of Brutalist structure – constructed for eternity on the promise of “a greater world” – are echoed by Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s woven architectural ruins composed from digital collages. It's also, among other mediums, the tapestry utilized by Markus Schinwald for his Panorama of Chaos: a implausible area of ruins deployed like a mural, the setting of a funereal theater of memory, embellished with scratched paintings, a mutilated vintage bust and casts of broken heads…

RIDES

In a disturbing choreographic set up giving the video display the appearance of a tomb, it is the break of the body that Omar Rajeh & Mia Habis stage in a powerful allegory of previous age entitled Walking within the wrinckles: following in close-up the sluggish movements of the truncated body of a centenarian dancer (Georges Macbriar) subtle in a cellular field, the digital camera walks us by means of the wrinkles and witherings of a pores and skin that seems already virtually lifeless. ..

PROTHESIS

Ruins of stones, ruins of the body… From these stagings of fragility outcome a proliferation of prostheses and different units hybridizing the dwelling and the machine in dystopian spaces, kinds of non-places or places in suspense, petrified or in turning into, post-human. Thus the environments sparse with pipes and big epoxy skins inlaid with embroidery by Klára Hosnedlová. Haunted by strange caparisoned “creatures” (in prostheses and rags) during performances, these very natural stagings of area evoke less disappearance than mutation. In addition to the filmic installations and biomorphic sculptures of WangShui, who exhibits right here “a landscape of one other world” co-written with synthetic intelligence to be able to explore the entanglement of human consciousness and the machine.

© ZDENEK PORCAL, STUDIO FLUSSER / ©MARTINE GUITIERREZ

METAMORPHISMS

Technico-archaeological amalgams proceeding from the concretion of pc relics (motherboards, onerous disks, processors…) melted in a man-made lava, the Metamorphism of Julian Charriere proceed from this similar hybridization. As well as the strange germinations of cables and crops in the immense panorama of science fiction deployed by Ugo Schiavi in the former Museum of Pure History (Guimet Museum) reworked into an deserted knowledge middle. Mixing crops, fossils and bones with human waste (modeled and projected in 3D), this Grafted Memory System plunges us right into a troubling “archaeology of the longer term”.