14th Biennale de Lyon: Floating Worlds

The 14th Biennale de Lyon will be curated by Emma Lavign and will open at the end of September 2017.

“It is in a context of galloping globalization generating constant mobility and accelerated flow—the “liquidity” of the world and of identities, in Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis—that the Biennale de Lyon is exploring the legacy and scope of the concept of “modernity” in the art of our time. The Biennale takes its title from the Japanese word ukiyô, which describes a view of the world as impermanent and continuously renewing itself, a source of freedom and creativity. The libertarian attitudes of artists, who constantly extend the limits of the work of art to make it even more open to the world, are central to our concerns. The Biennale de Lyon has dropped anchor in the heart of a place whose identity is partly shaped by the omnipresence of water, in a city “born of the waters,” through which the rivers Rhône and Saône flow. The Biennale reactivates an imagination carried along by the two rivers, generating a topography that unfolds like a voyage through an archipelago of islands that are, by turns, scenes to be looked at or stopping places where we can slow down and steep ourselves in the wonder, the awareness, the contemplation and reflection that they generate.” (Emma Lavigne)