12th Biennale de Lyon

Biennale de Lyon announces 12th Biennale de Lyon: Meanwhile… Suddenly, and Then open 12 September 2013–5 January 2014.

Novelists and screenwriters always hope they have an interesting story. These days, politicians too and advertisers are all on the look-out for a good story that can be used to influence voters and consumers. Not only are there “countless forms of narrative in the world,” as Roland Barthes would have it, but now they are everywhere and an integral part of our daily life.

For the Biennale de Lyon 2013, curator Gunnar B. Kvaran has invited artists from all over the world who work in the narrative field and use art to experiment with the modalities and mechanisms of storytelling. The exhibition gives pride of place to the ingenuity and inventiveness of contemporary artists in undoing mainstream narrative codes and off-the-peg plotting devices in order to tell new stories differently.

The art of these artist-storytellers comes in many and varied forms and uses a wealth of different registers, materials and techniques. So the exhibition naturally includes sculptures, paintings, fixed images, animated images, arrangements of text, arrangements of sounds and of objects in space, as well as performances. It highlights the way (or rather, ways) in which young artists of today—according to whether they work in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa or North America—are imagining the narratives of tomorrow: narratives that do without the suspense and excitement of globalised fiction as practised in Hollywood, on television, or in the best-sellers of world literature. Theirs are totally new narratives that defamiliarise us with the world and restore the deep-rooted strangeness and complexity that classic storytelling devices have always sought to iron out or to stifle. These are art narratives that enable us to see and understand the world in a new light and more intelligibly.
–Gunnar B. Kvaran

The artists as of 8 May 2013:
Jonathas Andrade De Souza (BR); Ed Atkins (GB); Trisha Baga (US); Matthew Barney (US); Neil Beloufa (FR); Gerry Bibby (AU); Dineo Seshee Bopape (ZA); The Bruce High Quality Foundation (US); Antoine Catala (FR); Paul Chan (US); Ian Cheng (US); Dan Colen (US); Petra Cortright (US); Jason Dodge (US); Aleksandra Domanovic (RS); David Douard (FR); Erro (IS); Roe Ethridge (US); Edward Fornieles (GB); Gabriela Fridriksdottir (IS); Robert Gober (US); Karl Haendel (US); Fabrice Hyber (FR); Glenn Kaino (US); Jeff Koons (US); Donna Kukama (ZA); Margaret Lee (US); Patricia Lennox-Boyd (GB); Ann Lislegaard (NO); Nate Lowman (US); MadeIn (CN); Vaclav Magid (RU); Helen Marten (GB); Thiago Martins De Melo (BR); Bjarne Melgaard (NO); Takao Minami (JP); Meleko Mokgosi (BW); Paulo Nazareth (BR); Paulo Nimer Pjota (BR); Yoko Ono (JP); Laure Prouvost (FR); Lili Reynaud-Dewar (FR); James Richards (GB); Alain Robbe-Grillet (FR); Matthew Ronay (US); Tom Sachs (US); Hiraki Sawa (JP); Mary Sibande (ZA); Gustavo Speridiao (BR); Tavares Strachan (BS); Nobuaki Takekawa (JP); Ryan Trecartin (US) & Lizzie Fitch (US); Peter Wachtler (DE); Hannah Weinberger (DE); Ming Wong (SG); Yang Fudong (CN); Anicka Yi (KR); Zhang Ding (CN)… www.biennaledelyon.com