All tagged biennale

Oliver Beer Resonance Project: The Cave

At the far end of the Grand Locos, a former train-repair depot-cum-main-exhibition-site for the 17th Lyon Biennale, there is a vast dark space. It takes your eyes a moment to adjust, but through the darkness you rapidly perceive a series of eight video screens, hung in a spiral formation, illuminating the space with an orange glow like fires in a cave. On each screen a person, holding aloft a flashlight, which illuminates the stalactites and the cave paintings that surround them. The figures begin to hum and trill different notes into the echoing chasm. Suddenly, a chord is struck, and the vibrations of their voices begin to fill the space like warm air. One by one, the filmed subjects sing. Different songs, different voices, different languages coalescing and harmonizing in a chorus that overwhelms you with waves of sound. You move through the space, spellbound by this sonorous butterfly garden. The notes flutter their little wings, enveloping you with something strange but familiar.

The 17th Lyon Biennale Gets Personal

The 17th Lyon Biennale kicked off at the end of September to great pomp. As guest curator Alexia Fabre announced to a crowd of journalists, this year’s edition is informed by ideas of personal relations, altruism and welcoming the other – vague but not irrelevant topics given how close France came to electing the far-right National Rally Party in July of this year. 

Among the most memorable works in the Grandes Locos – a former train-repair depot which serves as the biennial’s main site – is Gözde İlkin’s The Majority of Accent (2018–24), a mixed-media work in which the artist’s characteristic biomorphic figures are painted and embroidered onto the surface of a large textile print of a quarry. The work evokes the venue’s industrial past via images of labour organizing, accompanied by recorded interviews with former workers emitted from speakers hidden in printed, painted and embroidered sacks. 

La XVIe biennale d’Istanbul, écologie ou barbarie ?

ISTANBUL—Sur ce qui paraît être une chaîne d’information en continu, nous voyons l’arrivée d’un cortège officiel d’automobiles à l’entrée d’un palais présidentiel. La porte de l’une des limousines noires s’ouvre et en émerge un sac-poubelle, de la taille d’un homme. Le sac-poubelle et le Président s’étreignent avant d’entrer dans le palais. Dans la prochaine scène, les deux apparaissent derrière deux pupitres identiques lors d’une conférence de presse où les flashes des caméras les illuminent et les journalistes vocifèrent pour leur poser des questions. Ensuite, nous voyons le sac-poubelle s’adresser aux Nations Unies, avant que la caméra ne passe enfin sur une masse de plastique, de la taille d’un continent, flottant dans l’océan.