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First day at the Lyon Biennale
at Les Grandes Locos.

18th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art
„To pass from one dream to another“
Artistic Direction: @isabelle.bertolotti
Curator: @catherinenichols567
Exécutive director: @bourgeat.cecile
The former railway maintenance centre, Les Grandes Locos is an extraordinary setting for the Biennale. Today, the industrial architecture becomes part of the encounter with the works. Three threads in particular stayed with me:
There are aspects of repair, reuse and the transformation of materials.
Perhaps the most immediate connection to the history of the site. In Akwasi Bediako Afrane’s work, discarded electronic devices, cables and screens are dismantled and reassembled into a new, collective system. Selma Selman transforms the materials and machinery of scrap recycling into something unexpectedly delicate: “Flowers of Life”.

Movement, passage and infrastructure are inscribed in the history of Les Grandes Locos.
Here it takes on very different forms. Sriwhana Spong’s “Voile-voilà” creates a physical threshold to pass through, while simultaneously translating the movement of financial value into space. raumlabor_berlin transforms with „Montagne allégorique“ 120 tonnes of compressed wastepaper into an artificial landscape by turning a place once organised around efficient industrial movement into one for wandering and pausing.

And then the other side of industrial modernity: capital, labour and its systems.
Several works turn from materials and movement to the systems behind them. Igor Simić turns in „Loophole / Level in Golf Club: Wasteland„ global finance into a game of loopholes and unequal rules, while Nicholas Mangan’s “Reverse Capture” traces value through histories of exchange, colonialism and extraction, and Eva Barto’s “The Making of the Lure” examines property and the mechanisms of value.
With humour and a burlesque edge, Mette Sterre turns bureaucracy and alienated office life into performance, drawing on stories and workshops with residents of La Mulatière. Didn’t catch Mette Sterre’s Office Monsters complete caption
More to come. C’est parti pour le Musée des Tissus !

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$‘Two large-scale paintings frame the installation. ‘Divina’ resembles a printed circuit board, a structure fundamental to nearly all electronic devices. Its title is an anagram of Nvidia, a leading US-based technology company for AI computing hardware. Combining technical schematics with spiritual symbolism—most notably the hand at its center, evoking the divine—the painting draws attention to the extraction of raw materials such as copper and cobalt in the DRC, essential to global electronics production. With ‘Vita’, Katambayi reflects on the social fracture shaped by competition over natural resources and living systems within a capitalist order that struggles to find balance. The painting evokes tectonic, floral, and faunal illusions to suggest nature’s own capacity for equilibrium, structured through invisible axes that govern the Earth. Growing from geometric figures and lines, the artist’s drawings—placed between windows—form speculative reflections on human experience in relation to ecology, technology, and the economy, ranging from the impact of climate on human routines to cryptocurrency.’ —— Jean Katambayi Mukendi ‘RATIO’ through May 10, 2026 @kwinstitutefcontemporaryart Curators: Emma Enderby and Linda Franken Supported by KW Friends In co-production with M HKA - Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp photo credit: Frank Sperling _______________ #kwinstituteforcontemporaryart #kwberlin #kunstwerkeberlin #mhkamuseum #jeankatambayimukendi$

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