The 13th Biennale de Lyon, titled la vie moderne will bring together artists from 28 different countries who explore the contradictory character of contemporary culture in varied regions of the world. Their work addresses the ways in which multifarious legacies of the “modernˮ era continue to colour and shape our perceptions as well as the salient scenarios and issues of everyday life. With acuity and wit, a desire to engage and provoke different ways of understanding, and an adventurousness in fashioning new forms and images,
their work invites the public to reflect on and re-imagine our relationships to the present moment.
Ralph Rugoff, guest curator
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There is (unavoidably) an ironic dimension to this title la vie moderne, which evokes a more optimistic moment in history characterised by a confident faith in the “newˮ, the virtues of progress, and the centrality of reason. Today, when current events continually remind us that reason has a limited role in a world propelled by passionate and irrational convictions, the phrase “la vie moderneˮ seems like something of a period piece, a relic from another age. It thus evinces a decided ambiguity: to say something is “modernˮ imbues it with an aura of uncertainty – it suggests something haunted by history as well as forward-looking. It seems to me this ambiguity captures the changing character of our current relationships to time and history, which mark a significant departure from classic modernism’s pretense of suppressing or disguising its debts to the past and so concealing contradictions within its own character. Today it seems clear that there is no escape from history; instead our only choice is to engage with and repair its legacies.
While the death of modernism (not unlike the death of painting) has been declared on many occasions over the past half century, these pre-mature announcements reflect the very modernist impulse of announcing a clean break from the past or articulating a reaction against it – a position that prevents us from seeing and understanding the nature of the present situation and its continuing connections to history. In contrast to this approach, the artists in the 13th Biennale de Lyon embrace a modernism that is mixed, transitional, bricolaged, and punctured by history. Working with varied means and articulating fluid and playful positions and perspectives, their work explores notions of cultural overlap and simultaneity that depart from linear notions of history.
