Curated by Victoria Noorthoorn

“A Terrible Beauty Is Born” is a curious title for a French biennial organized by a Buenos Aires–based curator, given the strong association of W. B. Yeats’s phrase with the Irish revolution of 1916, but the rubric nonetheless heads this exhibition, framing Victoria Noorthoorn’s nineteen-point quasi manifesto celebrating art’s poetic potential. Conjoining neo-Surrealism (“mysticism, phantasmagoria, hallucination, delirium, the game, chance, and abandonment” are noted in point 2) and a Wildean vision of contradiction, the show will feature work by a global mix of some sixty-five artists—including the Otolith Group, Marlene Dumas, Robert Kus ́mirowski, Javier Téllez, and Judi Werthein—installed across four venues: La Sucrière, the Fondation Bullukian, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, and the T.A.S.E. factory. Texts by writers Carlos Gamerro and Rubén Mira and playwright Alejandro Tantanian promise to extend this biennial’s poetic impulse into the accompanying catalogue.

— T. J. Demos