CATHERINE DAVID TO CURATE 2009 LYON BIENNIAL

The Lyon Biennial has announced the selection of Catherine David as curator for the 2009 edition. David directed Documenta 10 in Kassel in 1994–97 and later the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam in 2002–2004. After studying linguistics and the history of art, she became a curator at the Centre Pompidou, before moving to the Jeu de Paume. Since Documenta 10, she has been organizing exhibitions, encounters, and transcultural publishing ventures, with an emphasis on establishing distinctive contexts for interchange with the public in respect of ideas, creativity, and artistic processes. Since 1998, she has been in charge of the “Représentations Arabes Contemporaines” project, which takes the form of exhibitions, seminars, and publications in various European cities. The project fosters contact between the Arab world and the art scene in order to effect changes of attitudes on both sides. In 2005–2006, David was guest researcher at the prestigious Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, where she continued her work on the Arab world. During this time, she also organized the monographic exhibition devoted to Bahman Jalali at the Fundació Tàpies in Barcelona and the interdisciplinary event “Di/Visions: Culture and Politics of the Middle East” at the World Culture Centre in Berlin. In spring 2008, she received the Bard College Award for Curatorial Excellence. She is currently chief curator at the Direction des Musées de France (French Museum Board). The last Lyon Biennial, in 2007, included fifty curators from all over the world and explored the new temporality that marks the societies of our time. According to the statement of artistic director Thierry Raspail in e-flux, the 2009 edition is “focused on history . . . and all the diversity and density of its recent manifestations.”