Catherine Nichols’s Lyon Biennale Turns a City Into a Poetic Framework
In the opening speech for the 2026 Lyon Biennale of contemporary art, artistic director Isabelle Bertolotti said she appointed curator Catherine Nichols for her “regard légèrement décentré” or “slightly off-center gaze.” It was meant as a compliment. Australian-born Nichols (who lives in Berlin and is presently a curator at Hamburger Bahnhof) brings to Europe knowledge of art from Oceania, whose reach doesn’t always stretch beyond its Pacific origins.
Work by Australian artists that Nichols included in the Lyon Biennale ranges from a brightly colored video by Serwah Attafuah featuring Afrofuturistic avatars to Mai Nguyễn-Long’s ensemble of ceramic sculptures, Vomit Girl, addressing diasporic displacement through folkloric forms. Māori artists like Ngahina Hohaia draw on legacies of collective memory in a mesmerizing video piece around a surging spring, while Rangi Kipa’s beautiful objects carved from sperm whale bone and tiger shark teeth honor ancestral customs. These, among others, are scattered throughout the Biennale’s three principal venues: “there’s no ‘section’ for people from Oceania… everybody’s interwoven with everybody else around the questions that they are reflecting on in their practices,” Nichols said.
Running through Dec. 13, the 18th edition is titled “To pass from one dream to another,” borrowing a phrase from a Walter Benjamin text. Overarching the Biennale, Nichols grafted on French artist Robert Filliou’s concept of “economy,” here reframed as a “poetic economy” rather than hard finances. (In one of those artspeak transpositions, what a “poetic economy” actually signifies is nebulous, if not altogether unclear.) Lyon’s past as a city of trade since antiquity forged Nichols’s approach: she cites its signature passageways (traboules) to highlight what she deems “Lyon’s psychogeography.” The concept seeks to widely encompass the 119 artists participating in this edition, often through themes of consumption, commodification and industry.
Nichols’s curation inhabits very different venues and adapts to the architectures accordingly: “we looked at very different registers,” she said. Moreover, “no artists were invited to ‘serve’ the thematic: they were invited to show existing work, to create new work and even expand on existing work to respond to Lyon as a city.” (There are 65 new creations and 12 adaptations). The roster features more women than men: 68 percent against 32 percent. Instead of cheering this, artistic director Bertolotti apologized for the absence of parity during the opening press speech. France!! Other statistics shared—without apology—include that 29 percent of artists are French and 23 percent of artists are under 35.
At Les Grandes Locos, a vast 19th-century industrial structure formerly occupied by the French National Railway Company, the massive space welcomed massive works. (For reference, imagine the dizzying heights of HangarBicocca in Milan.) The opening oeuvre—a multimedia installation intended to emulate a whale’s belly, scattered therein with debris and expanding and contracting with breath—is courtesy of Laure Prouvost (“much better than what she did at Grand Palais,” one visitor quipped). On the other side of Prouvost’s entry point, Madagascar-born Joël Andrianomearisoa’s textile torrent of ropes hangs like a downpour from the high ceiling, deploying a total of 44 kilometers of material. Ghanaian artist Akwasi Bediako Afrane repurposes accumulated electronic waste in Cerberus T-26 Dance of Dialogue (2026), making visible our relentless digital consumption, as products’ swift obsolescence drives us to buy more, despite the ever-more dire environmental consequences. It’s a grim panorama of detritus: things that powered us now useless and void, mere wire tentacles.
New Zealand-born Sriwhana Spong’s installation recalled Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s saffron-colored nylon fabric from The Gates, except Spong’s huge silk swathe was dyed by the bubbly beverage Fanta (its ingredients, like modified food starch and high fructose corn syrup, are listed as part of the work). Flanking this was Indonesian-born Candrani Yulis’s impactful textile installation Placing Bets Beyond the Line of Faith: a hybrid commentary on religion and feminine identity through color gradient lengths of hijab fabric suspended on hangers, laid out in a spinal structure as they spiraled from the floor upwards. Neighboring this, the collective raumlaborberlin used 120 metric tons of compressed strips of paper packaged like bales of hay and stacked into a grotto-like enclave intended for Romantic contemplation.
The exit route required bypassing Dutch artist Mette Sterre’s absurdist workplace fever dream. Instead of human heads, clusters of uncooked spaghetti sprouted from bodies clad in office attire. Calculators, file cabinets, briefcases, a water cooler and Xerox machines felt like a hallucinatory outcropping from the Mike Judge-style comedy Office Space.
Across town, the 19th-century Musée des Tissus et des Arts décoratifs offered a very different backdrop and a more modest sense of scale. Otherwise closed for renovations, the museum reopened specifically for the Biennale, left “as is” with ghostly traces in its corridors and ballrooms. In the courtyard, a Pepto-Bismol pink Peugeot Boxer is stationed, a vehicle-cum-artwork by Berlin duo EVA & ADELE (a pair for over 35 years, twinned to the point of presenting as “one conceptual artist”); the van’s door is slid open revealing Polaroids and fake flowers.
Inside the labyrinthine venue, a welcome dash of humor is found in a set of narrative works by Australian-born Ida Lawrence, drawn and written on grit sandpaper: wry cartoons in which family members chastise each other when they fight that they’ll be cut out of their respective wills or declare that the best skincare routine is not having children. Elsewhere is a six-channel video inspired by the anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. In We are Together Because… (2025), Greek-British Mikhail Karikis films a chorus of 52 teenagers singing on a stage before an orchestra, chanting repeatedly: “I still believe in people.”
In an annex space, Argentinian Mercedes Azpilicueta creates a whimsical installation she encourages visitors to touch, furthering hands-on participation through accessories like wings, paper masks and bells. Although the work is delicate, Azpilicueta feels anything can be repaired if broken. Even the fragile hanging Jacquard tapestry can be handled. The installation is fun and generous—the very opposite of precious.
At macLYON – Musée d’art contemporain, designed by Renzo Piano, the array of artists includes Ouassila Arras, who draws on Franco-Algerian histories and questions of assimilation through heaped rugs unraveling across an entire gallery floor, while Spanish artist Álvaro Urbano’s destroyed wall reveals branches and vegetation growing through a hole on the other side, a Narnia-like peephole into a world just beyond the confines of the museum structure. Interspersed throughout the contemporary art offerings are samplings from the natural history collection at Musée des Confluences, including assemblages of pyrite, stuffed owls and mummified cats.
Sites in medias res within the city, like LPA Saint-Antoine Car Park and the Part-Dieu Metro Station, showing one work apiece, are underwhelming and fully skippable. However, worth the detour is the emerging artist roundup presented at IAC (Institute of Contemporary Art), where Estonian Katariin Mudist’s Solution temporaire (2026) indexes the aesthetics of doorstoppers in an installation that cleverly explores everyday provisional gestures, while, more perversely, Swedish Maja Fredin’s discomfiting aesthetic around food and body image takes shape in miniature human skeletons built from picked-clean chicken bones and a set of faceless latex sculptures in heels, twerking postures creepily powered by embedded massagers.
Ultimately, rejiggering Robert Filliou as a discourse for the Biennale sounds ambitious but shoehorns the city’s heritage in a distended manner for a sense of coherence. Nichols demonstrates her strengths, however, through the room she gives to Indigenous artists, her enthusiastic spotlight on art by women and by bolstering the maximalist effect of voluminous work.
