Oct 27 2017

Floating Worlds: Highlights from the 14th Biennale de Lyon

by Andrew Stooke

It’s easy to get lost in art while exploring the three works by ERNESTO NETO that occupy almost the entire second floor of the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art for the 14th Biennale de Lyon. All images by Andrew Stooke for ArtAsiaPacific.

The arms of the rivers Rhône and Saône embrace Lyon. Calm and deep, the water is in tune with artworks shown in the city’s 14th biennial festival that often, beneath shimmering surfaces, express ominous danger. In the four concurrent programs that make up “Mondes Flottants” (or “Floating Worlds”), the overarching theme is of floating as a charmed but precarious state—perhaps a prelude to drowning. For the biennial, Emma Lavigne, who is director of Centre Pompidou-Metz, curated an exhibition in two venues, La Sucrière and Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art; “Rendez-vous” was a separate exhibition for emerging artists; “Veduta” was a series of dialogue events involving people outside the central Lyon conurbation; and a network of heterogeneous exhibitions took place under the title “Resonance” in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region.

The two main venues, each facing a different river, are filled with howling and rumbling drones, as well as lilting sonorities. Sound and movement augment many works. These characteristics are employed to express disquiet, instability and the hint of a hidden threat.

France-based Chinese artist duo Hao Jingfang & Wang Lingjie brought their light-refracting installation Over the Rainbow (2016) to the biennial; it epitomizes a sense of fragility that appears in many other creations that were presented. On first appearance, Hao and Wang’s installation looks like a pristine mud flat exposed only when the tide recedes. From certain angles, we see an iridescent rainbow fluttering over its surface, drawing the spectator to the very edge of the work to get a better view (one step further and they would trample over the pure surface left by the artists). The illusion is produced from a combination of artificial light and the optical qualities of the work’s granular prismatic material. The beauty appears simple and delicate, like lotus pollen dancing in light beams, but it is precarious, reliant on the chance confluence of a natural effect and electric light, mediated by the viewer’s relative position. To catch a glimpse of its transitory manifestation, this rainbow demands exact alignment.

Lavigne, the biennial’s curator, suggests that we should seek safe harbors, but the displayed artworks do not posit safe and enduring refuges. Instead, they reference the need for precise and cautious navigation and imply that we are too far out already to heed the ominous warning of a coming storm. Here are the highlights from the 14th Biennale de Lyon.

La Sucrière, a former warehouse facing the Saône and one of the Biennale’s principle venues, was festooned with MARCO GODINHO’s Untitled (Transparent Flags) #3 (2007–11).

PRATCHAYA PHINTHONG’s time-lapse film of an abandoned billboard on the outskirts of Bangkok, Reality Ripple (2017), records a transition as local flora creeps toward this neglected opportunity for advertisement. The billboard’s austere surface also suggests the strictures of social and political conformity in Thai society.

A new version of DAVID MEDALLA’s classic kinetic sculpture Cloud Canyons, from 1963, was presented in Lyon. The soap bubbles, constantly renewed and continuously degrading, suggest an expendable resource reaching its limit.

In the video Black of Death (2007–13) by Japanese collective CHIM↑POM, one member of the group carries a stuffed raven through the streets of Fukushima. Crows, who have proliferated since the nuclear disaster of 2011, gather as an ominous witness to the action.

YOKO ONO’s Freight Train (1999) was one of the few works presented outside the main exhibition venues. Ono describes the work as “a memorial to all the injustices of the 20th century” and “a manifesto of resistance, cure and hope for the future.”

Salt pours forth in DAMIÁN ORTEGA’s Hollow / Stuffed: Market Law (2012, foreground), while the batteries of the electric car in PRATCHAYA PHINTHONG’s Ephemeral Cinema (2004, background) have been expended, rendering it immobile.

APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL’s 2014 video Fireworks (Archives) provides disturbing images caught in the fleeting bursts of light. The footage is projected onto a transparent screen, further disrupting the sense of situation, confusing the relative positions of spectator and subject.

DIA MEHTA BHUPAL having just completed the installation of her work made of rolled paper from magazines at “Rendez-vous.” The work is substantial in scale, with a significant amount of labor put into its creation, though the artist’s chosen material is a reminder of her installations’ ephemeral nature.

Paired with works by Marcel Duchamp, YUKO MOHRI’s Moré Moré [Leaky]: The Falling Water Given #4–6 (2017) humorously references Duchamp’s work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1923). She proposes that an Asian context highlights the bias of a hegemonic, transatlantic art historical canon, and joyfully offers improvised repairs to patch up the situation.

Virtual reality offered moments of rest and tranquillity in Australia-based MATHIEU BRIAND’s I Dream of You (2017), transporting visitors to the shores of Madagascar.

HANS HAACHE’s undulating sea of white silk was at La Sucrière.

SHIMABUKU’s Cuban Samba (Remix) (2016) is performed by an impossible band of musicians—featuring veterans of Brazilian Avant-punk scene, Kassin and Arto Lindsay—supported by the sound of rain falling on empty tins.

FUKUROI SHIZUOKA’s loveable installation Face on Rope (2010) was at Lyon Contemporary Art Institute, part of “Rendez-vous.”

LEE MINGWEI’s exquisite conceptual proposal at Fondation Bullukian was one of the uncategorized islets of the Biennale’s “archipelago.” The Living Room (2000) is a gentle domestic space where gallery staff and local groups can cultivate long-term relationships, embellishing the chamber with their own objects for a personal touch.

Music is a recurring motif throughout the works at Lyon. In FERNANDO ORTEGA’s video Stolen Time (2017) a lone flautist approaches, performs Kazuo Fukushima’s 1956 composition Requiem, and then walks back into the darkness.

JILL MAGID’s offering to the memory of Mexican architect Luis Barragán looks exuberant, and is part of a larger conceptual work incorporating the disinterment of Barragán’s ashes.

LYGIA PAPE’s work New House (2000) is in two parts—this vitrine, containing debris from a collapsed room, meant to remind viewers of the destruction of favelas in Brazil; and a replica situated in the Yijuca forest of Rio de Janeiro that will degrade over time as it is exposed to the elements of nature.

Sound was ever present at Lyon. DAVID TUDOR’s Rain Forest V (Variation 2) (1973–2015) is a multi-feed broadcast, where different sounds are relayed in speakers embedded in the objects that form the installation. Audience members must move from one source of sound to another in order to experience the entire audio arrangement.

The 14th Biennale de Lyon is on view until January 7, 2018.

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