An endless string of commas: the 18th Lyon Biennale

The result is a Biennale conceived around an expanded idea of the word economy, with three “registers”—the existential, the relational, and the industrial—explored respectively in a trio of main locations: the MAC Lyon, the Musée des Tissus, and the Grandes Locos. In the curator’s essay, these distinct subthemes are followed by an almost exhaustive accumulation of related subjects, separated by commas, linking the living, the dead, inheritance, debt, obligations, fear, desire, care, love, dependency, recognition, circulation, exchange, labor, energy, materials, machines, and fantasies, among others. In stretching the concept of economy to encompass such a broad range of ideas, however, the proposition becomes so elastic that it is difficult to say precisely what is at stake. Everything becomes “economy.”

What is widely overlooked, however, is the economy of art itself: the material conditions under which it is produced and sustained. This is particularly pressing in France, and even more so in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region hosting the Biennale, where mounting financial pressure on public authorities has translated into cuts to cultural budgets and grants, forcing many organizations to do more with less, or close altogether. This makes the Biennale’s stated ambition that its “international reach be rooted in a vibrant local context,” as its general director Cécile Bourgeat puts it, feel somewhat misleading: Although the scene is indeed vibrant, it is also facing an increasingly dire situation. At Lyon’s signature art event, these constraints are drowned out by the poetics and spectacular scale of it all.

If the Biennale is to be read as a poem of sorts, per Filliou’s proposition, it goes without saying that it favors the epic over the haiku, privileging length over precision. Still, some works resist being overlooked, holding their ground and acquiring the force of a line from a poem remembered long thereafter. I began my whirlwind tour of the Biennale at the city’s contemporary art museum, MAC Lyon, where the concept of economy is explored through the prism of the “existential,” or “relations between the living and the dead, the ground and the sky, inheritance and debt,” as Nichols explains in her essay. On the first floor, a darkly painted room lit by spotlights brings together taxidermied owls borrowed from the Musée des Confluences, a local natural history museum, with a series of paintings and sculptures by Pol Taburet. The artist’s nearly faceless figures, rendered in grays and blacks against flat planes of color that evoke ambiguous interiors and landscapes, appear in mysterious settings recalling a courtroom, perhaps, or a funeral procession. This elusive quality also suffuses a selection of Taburet’s hybrid sculptural creatures, emerging from a large wooden wardrobe and a tomb-like plinth, echoing the artist’s idea that stories are transmitted through bodies and connections between the living and the dead, as mentioned in the wall text.

The pairing of natural-history specimens with contemporary artworks recurs throughout the MAC Lyon, with mummified cats presented alongside erotic collages by Barbara Breitenfellner, and sulfur minerals surrounded by Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s black-and-white photographs of people wearing grotesque masks in postwar suburban Kentucky. By quite literally juxtaposing natural specimens with artworks, the exhibition indeed draws out existential notions, while nonetheless raising questions about the use of display languages more commonly associated with ethnographic museums. This tension is particularly acute in the presentation of Palestinian artist Yasmeen Al Daya’s Embrace (2024), a palm-size unfired clay figure curled into a fetal position, suggesting protection, mourning, or withdrawal. Made amid the destruction in Gaza and replicated by artist Petrit Halilaj in collaboration with Al Daya, who remains in the Palestinian enclave, the work is displayed in the same glass-encased black plinth used for the sulfur minerals on the second floor. This gesture poses a difficult question: What happens when a contemporary artwork created in the context of an ongoing genocide is absorbed into a display language associated with the classification and preservation of artifacts?

Perhaps the curator’s idea of an expanded economy goes hand in hand with bridging gaps—between cultures, generations, objects, or modes of display—as this act of connecting resonates throughout the Biennale. In that regard, the curation at the MAC Lyon is quite successful. For example, a gallery with kelly-green walls brings together Ouassila Arras’s 2018 installation Photos de famille (Family Photos), in which a collection of carpets given to the artist by family members and friends both unravel and interweave (reflecting the resilient yet fragile histories of Franco-Algerian families and acting as a form of portraiture), and German artist Manfred Paul’s intimate series of black-and-white analog photographs of his wife, Verena.

The exhibition at the Musée des Tissus (Textile Arts Museum) focuses on “relational economy,” or the “forever complex business of living with and through others,” yet manages to overlook the economic history embedded in the building itself. The museum occupies two eighteenth-century hôtels particuliers originally built for an adviser to the Court of Coins (a royal court that regulated currency and countered monetary fraud), raising questions of wealth and privilege. Located in one of Lyon’s more conservative neighborhoods, the museum has been closed since 2021 for renovations. A proposed architectural project was recently rejected after neighboring residents protested that it would obstruct views from their apartments. Temporarily reopened for the Biennale, the museum is expected to close again afterward, leaving its longer-term future uncertain. These tensions—between heritage and transformation, private interests and public institutions, and different forms of access—could have offered a tangible economy of property, class, and public space to explore, yet remain inexplicably outside the exhibition’s scope.

Inside the museum, corridors are punctuated by projections of a performance by dancer and choreographer Angela Goh, which was filmed in the museum while empty. This ghostly presence is amplified by the building itself: half-painted, crumbling, graffitied walls, remnants of past exhibitions. This atmosphere extends to installations by Fiona Clark and Edith Dekyndt, as well as to Paraflu (2025), a film by Michela de Mattei and Invernomuto. In the museum’s vitrines, Clark’s Polaroid Pests (2023–26) brings together 192 annotated Polaroids of dead animals photographed on her property in Taranaki, Aotearoa New Zealand, alongside childhood objects including plush toys and an apron. Dekyndt’s L’image des choses et non les choses elles-mêmes (The Image of Things and Not the Things Themselves, 2026) similarly transforms disparate items—a rusted knife, a hair-filled box, a tapestry, a half-metal basketball—into reliquaries, tracing how objects carry the histories of their production and use across global contexts. In Paraflu, projected in a blue-floored room that still bears the traces of a Monet-esque water-lily mural—presumably remnants of the museum’s former display—documentary sequences and AI-generated images rendered with an analog quality trace the history of antifreeze being used as a poison to kill wolves in northern Italy, and the animals’ recent return.

What is widely overlooked, however, is the economy of art itself: the material conditions under which it is produced and sustained.

On the outskirts of the city at the Grandes Locos, a vast nineteenth-century industrial site originally built to maintain train locomotives, the Biennale turns to the industrial realm—and struggles most visibly with scale. Monumental installations compete with the building itself, rubbing shoulders with shipping containers (these felt sauna-like during opening weekend) that house video works, while smaller offerings are drowned out, making the exhibition feel less like an expanded economy than an economy of excess.

Some installations make productive use of this scale: Selma Selman’s Flowers of Life (2014), in which steel “flowers” composed of industrial claws used in the scrap-metal trade slowly open and close while giving off the scent of engine oil and gasoline, a fragrance the artist titled The Most Dangerous Woman in the World (2024); Candrani Yulis’s Placing Bets Beyond the Line of Fate (2021), hundreds of hijabs spiraling upward on clothes hangers; raumlabor_berlin’s Montagne allégorique (Allegorical Mountain, 2026), which transforms 120 tons of shredded paper into a labyrinth punctuated by bubblegum-pink pools; and Mette Sterre’s humorous office, in which suit-wearing mannequins made of rubber bands inhabit a space punctuated by motivational, start-up-style slogans affixed to desks, computers, watercoolers, and other office furniture, while visitors are invited to race each other on rolling office chairs along a delineated course. Other works feel unnecessarily large, bringing into question the labor, cost, and shipping needed for such installations to exist. Faced with such production-heavy works, the sarcasm of the “In this economy?” meme starts to ring particularly loud.

The former bathrooms and shower rooms of the Grandes Locos, by contrast, offer a more human scale and provide some of the exhibition’s more substantial encounters. Works by artists from the Beaux-Arts de Lyon’s esteemed post-diploma program occupy the showers, while Clark’s portraits of women working in Auckland shopping centers in the 1970s enter into dialogue with Rose Frigière’s +237-4C Para Salon (2026), a functioning archive and hair salon addressing the distortions of colonial representation. Eva Barto’s The Making of the Lure brings the exhibition’s economic concerns most directly into focus, satirizing the production of a film about a debt-ridden Pinocchio. Mixing mockumentary and behind-the-scenes footage, Barto’s film stages encounters with banks, insurers, and lenders, exposing the power dynamics and disparities that structure financial exchange. This direct callout of domineering economic actors felt sorely needed.

Navigating a biennial titled “To pass from one dream to another” effectively evokes the disorienting logic of slumber, if not the state produced by waking. My experience of the Biennale also made me think of doomscrolling on social media, in which an algorithm puppeteers content into a frenetic sequence that can feel incoherent yet is supposedly connected by some invisible logic. Perhaps this is precisely what Nichols is showing us in Lyon: In a world where capitalism maintains a steadily tightening grip on almost every aspect of our lives—from our dreams to our health care to our relationships—even our seemingly irrational associations are no longer entirely our own. Still, in this context of increasingly fragmented attention, I wish the exhibition had been a little more focused.

The somewhat diffuse notion of an expanded economy extends to the Biennale’s “Resonance” program, through which cultural institutions from across the city and region can apply to be included with projects that respond to the curatorial framework, which this year was broad enough to accommodate a long list of partnering organizations and a truly disparate range of proposals. What deserves greater attention, however, is the local ecosystem of artists and art workers who sustain this vibrant scene, often with limited resources and precarious funding. Smaller spaces, which I dare call institutions not for their scale or political weight but for their sustained engagement with both local and international art scenes, are falling victim to budget cuts while continuing to assemble genuinely engaging and important programs. Highlights of the opening weekend included Pierre-Olivier Arnaud and Denis Savary’s “Josy’s Club” at Bikini, an art space founded in 2011 that was recently stripped of all its state funding. The artists transformed the space into what looks like the entrance to a residential building, incorporating elements drawn from architecture, including anti-homeless structures and terrazzo floors, to address questions of reproducibility and uniformization.

My true highlight, however, was Francesc Ruiz’s performance How to Do Things with Police (2026), whose title plays on the word police, which in French also means typeface. The performance was part of his exhibition “BDPD,” curated by Camille Richert at La Salle de Bains, which in recent years has also faced budget cuts despite twenty-five years of sharp programming, from Jon Armleder to Anthea Hamilton and Merlin Carpenter. BD abbreviates bande dessinée (comic book), while PD can function as either slang or a homophobic slur, depending on the speaker. Together, BDPD suggests a “gay comic book” while also evoking “Bondage Discipline Police Department,” as Ruiz wrote on a mirror during the performance.

The exhibition transformed the space into a gay comic-book shop, with a single comic available under hundreds of different covers drawn by Ruiz. The performance presented the idea of a “queer font” through a recto-verso poster featuring a mirrored letter that, depending on how it was held, could become a b, p, d, or q, the last not pertaining to the title but standing in for queer. The doubled curve of the letter suggested a bum or cock and balls. Ruiz flipped and rotated the poster, turning the letter into a prop for gestures suggesting sucking, being fucked, or fucking, then rolled it up and tightened it with a rubber band as a reference to bondage. Despite the overt sexual references, the performance was far from obscene: The gestures remained disarmingly direct, sending the audience laughing and, ultimately, rushing to buy the book, slipping it into its transparent sleeve and fondling it on the way out.

The 18th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art runs through December 13, 2026.