The 16th Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art opens

The sixteenth Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art has just opened and this edition will utilise many of the city’s most iconic locations and buildings, from the Roman archaeological sites to the industrial wastelands, and from the religious museum to the natural history museum.

All the arts from all eras will be on display, under the theme of the fragility of the world, and the aim is to bring together powerful new works with works from the past, while also taking a glimpse into the future. 

Director and co-curators 

We caught up with Isabelle Bertolotti, co-director of Biennale de Lyon, at the Lugdunum Museum & Roman Theaters. 

""We are lucky in Lyon to have a visibility of history through its architecture, through its museums. So we really had a big collaboration, from Antiquity to the present day,, which allowed us to make this link between contemporary art as we imagine it nowadays but also ancient art and to see all the links that can be woven between these two temporalities and its artists in any case."

The former Fagor factories, now a industrial wasteland, is the largest of the Biennial's exhibition spaces. All artistic forms are present here, from painting to multimedia, including sculpture and photography. An exhibition entitled A Manifesto of Fragility, has been put together by two world-renowned curators, Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath.

Sam Bardaouil, is co-curator of Biennale de Lyon 2022. 

"A lot of the artists here are from Lebanon or from any part of the world and this is one of the threads that guided us, Till and I, was to actually think about artists that thinking about fragility and the material they use and the histories they tackle and the issues that they raise and the questions that they ask."

Till