Rays of light refract whilst luminous spectral colors fill the room, the flowing movement of the water casts a spell over us through seemingly infinitely overlapping images. Suddenly it becomes clear that all these images originate from a digital source, turning the river into a metaphor for our post-digital lives, in which bodies are fluid and the self takes shape in the intricate mirrors of the internet. The first large scale installation that visitors are confronted with, À la recherche du fruit ligneux, aux confluences des eaux by Shivay La Multiple is perhaps the smartest response to the quite obvious theme of the 17th Biennale de Lyon Art contemporain “Les voix des fleuves” [“Voices of the Rivers”]. Rarely does this year’s Biennale address the theme in its significance for the state of the world more emphatically than it does with this work.
The installation is part of this year’s biennial exhibition “Jeune création internationale” hosted by the IAC — Institut d’art contemporain — Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes since 2009. For each iteration of the project, the IAC, together with the MAC Lyon, La Biennale de Lyon, and an art school from the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of France — this year, the ESAAA in Annecy — embarks on a selection process to bring together a total of ten younger, up-and-coming, international and regional artists. The selected participants were given the opportunity to work on the submitted projects on site and in advance. To say it straight away: this “Jeune création internationale” succeeds in creating a framework that impressively showcases the intensity, versatility and differentiation of the installation works by providing the artists with space, time and means of production. Accordingly, the majority of the works were created for this context and raise questions that have a significant impact on our present. As topics of each artistic proposal are diverse, the rooms are reviewed here in the order in which visitors experience them on site.
In their installation Be Our Guest, Hilary Galbreaith addresses structural problems of the hospitality industry. In texts presented on a series of mattresses, Galbreaith gives a voice to people who work in a sector in which hospitality has long been subject to economic principles. The installation is less playful and more formally structured compared to the artist’s previous works. Its strength lies in its ability to expose exploitative structures by addressing precarious working conditions from multiple perspectives — a relevant topic for the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, where the most important service sector is tourism.
In contrast to this, the following installation shows that the world can absolutely not be freely traveled by everyone. Meri Karapetyan shows a larger-than-life barbed wire sculpture made of aluminum dealing with the deconstruction of the concept of the border. The artist is the youngest participant in the exhibition and thus herself part of a generation that is growing up in a world that is reintroducing war for territory, intensifying the construction of border fences, and allowing borders to become cruel fates for people. The artist invites us to cross her border physically, which is nothing less than a sign of hope.
That the present, however, requires the fight for rights is made visible in the next room. The collaborative installation project Amoxtli by Vir Andres Hera explores the concept of nepantla: in the Aztec language Nahuatl, the meaning of the word defines the space between two worlds, the liminal space in which mutation and multiplicity becomes possible. The film work is dedicated to the emancipation of the LGBTQIA+ community. “We are aware that text is indeed a biological weapon,” it says, and in view of the fact that queerphobia is being fueled by right-wing populist politics all over, their statement is of enormous importance: “You must know: We are armed to the teeth.”
The presentations address not only how we as humans want to live together, but also how we want to treat nature and its resources. Welcome to the Plastic Age by Ines Katamso is a floor work, which deals with the pollution of the environment by nanoplastic. Having created a dystopian landscape, the artist merges natural and artificial materials irretrievably. It was already in 2019, when a study by the University of Newcastle in Australia, published by the WWF, found that an average person ingests an estimated 5 grams of microplastics per week, which is the weight of a credit card. In turn, Sahil Naik has created an immersive installation based on the history of the Indian village Curdi that was flooded in the 1980s. It shows the destroyed landscape together with the singing testimonies of the last inhabitants of the village. The village was flooded in the context of India's water shortage, and it is not without irony that today tourists are lured there to see the remains of the once-thriving village in the hot summer months, when the water level of the reservoir is low.
Further positions raise the question of the state of our society from different points of view. Nothing special 1.0 is an installation by Nadežda Kirćanski that consists of a photo projection and a round seating area with indoor plants inside. It is reminiscent of the cold waiting rooms of hospitals, where not only the bodies but also the feelings of people are subject to postmodern power structures. This makes clear that the principle of the current control societies has by no means replaced the disciplinary processes and thus their institutions. Rather, the body as a battleground of political and economic interests is more contested than ever. La Maison en bois de lune by Jenetta and Szymon Kula, on the other hand, brings old customs, traditional craftsmanship, pre-industrial tools and the question of productivity and effectiveness into a context that sheds a revealing light on late capitalist society. It is the rationality of the modern age that they question, which declared capitalism to be a factor for equality and whose failure we are now radically experiencing. Their works are wonderfully beyond time, while Anastasia Sosunova is concerned with a specific place and its history. The artist refers to the first Lithuanian printing house Rotas— which also published the first Lithuanian gay magazine— by reproducing the windows of the building, because these, after the building was abandoned, became a graffiti board on which lovers tagged their names. With this work, Sosunova also asks about the spaces of an open, diverse society, about places of encounter, love and ecstasy, about safe spaces and about the possibilities of public visibility.
The last room was created by Matthias Odin. His installation stands out because it intervenes in the architecture of the IAC. By reconstructing an apartment within the space and creating assemblages from domestic objects, the artist reflects on his own period of constant mobility — a time with no permanent address, staying with friends. He writes: “Lights make walls bigger, make them tighter, bring us closer, push us further away, comfort us, frighten us, keep us awake in the morning and we have to move again.”
This exhibition makes it possible to experience the topics of our present as topics of a world in transition. It is a world full of contradictions, a contemporaneity, as philosopher Peter Osborne makes clear, to which we cannot remain neutral1: it demands more than ever the translation of the differences and overlaps immanent to our time, which is our divided present.