13th Biennale De Lyon: “La Vie Moderne”
Curated by Ralph Rugoff
Have we never been modern? Rugoff’s show turns Bruno Latour’s famous thesis about the non-existence of modernity into a question. Indeed, even after the many pronouncements of its death, modernism has been continually cannibalized and reanimated. Featuring works by sixty artists from twenty-eight countries, this show homes in on the ways in which modernism’s specter haunts the uncertainties that underlie discourses of postcolonialism and immigration, environmental degradation, and economic precariousness. With Kader Attia’s video installation taking up the cultural aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack and Yuan Goang-Ming’s video projection produced in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, as well as Andreas Lolis’s Monument to the Greek Crisis, 2015, and new works by Camille Blatrix, Nina Canell, and Alex Da Corte, the exhibition promises a far-flung sampling of the (at times) contradictory afterlives of modernism.
