The 17th Lyon Biennale closed in January 2025 under Alexia Fabre — the institution's first single female artistic director in twenty years. The 18th, in 2026, will be the first to follow Thierry Raspail's departure as the institution's long-running director.
The Lyon Biennale was founded in 1991 by Thierry Raspail — who had been appointed director of the new Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon (MAC Lyon) in 1984 — together with Thierry Prat, with whom he had previously organised Octobre des Arts and the 1988 exhibition La couleur seule. The first edition (L'Amour de l'art, 3 September – 13 October 1991) opened across three sites — the Halle Tony Garnier, the contemporary museum (then still housed inside the Musée des beaux-arts), and ELAC — with sixty-nine artists and seventy-three thousand visitors. MAC Lyon would not relocate to its current Renzo Piano building at the Cité Internationale until 1995; the founding edition was therefore staged across the post-industrial and civic infrastructure that has continued to shape the institution's distributed-venue model ever since.
The gamble paid off, slowly. By the late 1990s the Lyon Biennale had become the most consistently substantial French contemporary art institution outside Paris, and the principal showcase for international art-making within the French-speaking world. The structural decisions Raspail made early — that the Biennale would commission a fresh artistic director for each edition, rather than maintain a permanent curatorial team; that the exhibition would be hosted across a network of post-industrial venues in the Confluence district rather than concentrated at MAC Lyon; and that the institution's operating relationship with the City of Lyon and the regional government would be preserved through a non-profit association rather than a state institution — have shaped the Biennale's continuing identity.
The temporal trilogy and the international turn
The 7th Lyon Biennale in 2003, C'est arrivé demain / It happened tomorrow, was curated by the Consortium of Dijon — Xavier Douroux, Franck Gautherot and Eric Troncy — with Robert Nickas and Anne Pontégnie, opening the institution's trilogy on temporality and giving La Sucrière its first use as a Biennale venue. The 8th, in 2005, was the trilogy's second part — L'Expérience de la durée, co-directed by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans, then co-founding directors of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris — and drew the most sustained international attention the institution had so far received. The 9th, in 2007, was curated by Stéphanie Moisdon and Hans Ulrich Obrist under the title The History of a Decade That Has Not Yet Been Named, extending the discursive register. Bourriaud's curatorial method — the long discursive framework, the foregrounding of artist communities rather than individual practices, the attention to the structural conditions of art production — proved well-suited to Lyon's distributed-venue model. Subsequent artistic directors (Hou Hanru in 2009, Victoria Noorthoorn in 2011, Ralph Rugoff in 2015, Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath in 2022, and now Alexia Fabre) have each worked within or against the precedents these editions established.
The 17th, and what comes next
The 17th Lyon Biennale, curated by Alexia Fabre under the title Les voix des fleuves — Crossing the Water, opened on 21 September 2024 and closed on 5 January 2025. Fabre — director of MAC VAL (the Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne) from 2005 to 2022, and subsequently Director of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris — built the exhibition around the metaphor of rivers and the political condition of mobility, drawing both on Lyon's specific geography (the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône) and on the broader European condition of border-crossing. The reception in the French press was substantial; the international press read the edition as a competent but not transformative contribution to the institution's running history.
The 18th, scheduled for 2026, will be the first Lyon Biennale to follow Thierry Raspail's departure from his role as MAC Lyon director, which has been the institutional anchor of the Biennale for thirty-four years. The selection of the 18th artistic director has been quieter than past appointments; the curatorial committee's process has been less public-facing. What the post-Raspail Lyon Biennale will be is, as of this writing, an open institutional question.
