18th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art: To pass from one dream to another

For a poetical economy

What if economy were understood less as a separate sphere of markets and finance than as woven into the ways in which lives are sustained over time? For the French artist and economist Robert Filliou, lasting social change depended on transforming economic structures. His search for a “poetical economy” is the starting point for the Biennale’s broader enquiry into what is inherited and owed, cared for and desired, made, exchanged, used up and passed on – and into how economy, in this expanded sense, might be imagined otherwise.

—Catherine Nichols, curator


Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon (macLyon)

Commissioned for the Lyon Biennale is Matthew Harris' Inalienable Possession. "Across ten raw cotton canvases, Harris paints a grid of 39,000 cells in vivianite, a rare blue mineral pigment sometimes called “corpse crystal” because it forms from minerals released by decaying organic matter. Each cell corresponds to one of approximately 39,000 Aboriginal cultural belongings held in UK institutions. Many remain unphotographed, uncatalogued or inaccessible, represented publicly only by numbers or redacted spreadsheets. The grid adopts the impersonal language of institutional classification, yet its handmade surface wavers and gathers into encrusted areas. Reclamation is central to Harris’s practice, which traces the ongoing circulation of First Peoples belongings through colonial and commercial systems. By giving material form to an abstract institutional count, Harris makes visible the scale of dispossession and frames recognition as a first step towards the reclamation of cultural belongings."

Jazz Money, garrandarang, 2021: "A spiral poem follows the concentric growth rings of a tree across the floor. In garrandarang, which means “paper” or “book” in Wiradjuri, Jazz Money traces connections between rivers and trade routes, leaves and paper, breath and atmosphere, while languages, forests and waterways are drawn into histories of extraction. “Those eyes are seeing only what can be extracted,” the poem observes, before turning towards seeds carried by the wind, forests that continue to stand and languages that persist. The poem refuses to elegise what has been destroyed, affirming instead the continued presence of Country, whose living abundance exceeds the logic of extraction."