The aesthetics of the ruin at the Lyon Biennale

The sixteenth Lyon Biennale is marked by a plentiful offer in twelve places in the city. It testifies to the fragility and resistance of art in chaos. An aesthetic of ruin with Beirut and its artists as a highlight.

We never forget Beirut. Sam Bardaouil, an art historian born in Lebanon, is with Till Fellrath curator of the sixteenth Lyon Biennale. The duo, who lives in Berlin, is also at the head of the prestigious Hamburger Bahnhof, the great current art museum in the German capital. However, it is to the history of Beirut that we can link their intervention in Lyon. A major event of contemporary art in France, the operation is named this year "Manifesto of Fragility": "A new way of seeing the world, they say. Two hundred artists from Ancient Rome to our time tell this feeling widely experienced in the last two years. ”

Spread over twelve places throughout the city, the visit opens, on the top floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) with an imaginary portrait consisting of several works that illustrate the life of a silk industry worker in Lyon in the 19th century, Louise Brunet. Against all expectations, the one who joined the canut revolution in 1834 will end her life in Beirut. Here is the link found with Lyon by Sam Bardaouil: "Beruit is in essence a symbol of fragility but also of resistance.”

An entire floor of the MAC is devoted in 230 pieces, mainly paintings, to artistic production since the 1960s in Lebanon, with, among other things, the breathtaking and sensual paintings of Huguette Caland (1931-2019) recently honored in various exhibitions around the world.

We also discover the abstract ones of Simone Fattal (born in 1942). It is best known for its sculptures that seem to represent primitive deities attacked by time, presented among other things at the moment at the Venice Biennale.

Contemporary artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (born in 1969) have imagined a spectacular installation that takes video images of the impact of the explosion of the port of Beirut in 2020 inside the local museum of modern art, the Sursock Museum. The spectator looks, with short breath, the disaster that passes and goes back in a loop. By miracle, some works of the institution were saved and even made the trip to Lyon.

Modern Pompeii

Among the staggering works of this sixteenth biennial in Lyon is at the Fagor factories a gigantic 190 m2 sculpture by the Belgian Hans Op de Beeck (born in 1969) which depicts a Pompeii of the 21st century: a full-size caravan camp at full size, with its traces of life (children's bicycles, bird cages, plastic chairs) seems All the space, from floor to ceiling, is covered with gray paint, like the ashes of a volcano.

Not far away, the remarkable paintings of the American Christina Quarles (born in 1985) represent bodies dismantled and assembled in assemblies of different pictorial techniques. Ruins of humans in short.

The apocalypse finds its apotheosis in the abandoned Guimet Museum in Lyon, where giant aquariums of Ugo Schiavi (born in 1987) are inhabited by creeping plants, those that grow in places abandoned by man. We knew the landscapes of ruins painted by Hubert Robert, so popular in the 18th century. Here is the revival of this aesthetic, a symbol of a dilapidated society. It just takes other forms.