LYON.- The 18th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art will open September 19 under the title Passer d’un rêve à l’autre / To pass from one dream to another, bringing an expansive international exhibition to museums, former industrial buildings and public spaces across the French city through December 13, 2026. Curated by Berlin-based Australian writer and art historian Catherine Nichols, the edition takes Lyon itself — its history of trade, textiles, labor and circulation — as a point of departure for a broader reflection on how value is created, exchanged and sustained.
At the center of Nichols' approach are Lyon's traboules, the network of semi-hidden passageways, courtyards and staircases that connect streets and buildings in Vieux Lyon, the Presqu'île and the slopes of Croix-Rousse. Historically used by silk workers to move through the city, the passages have also been associated with labor struggles and the French Resistance. For Nichols, they offer both a physical and conceptual model for a Biennale concerned with movement between states, histories, systems and ways of understanding the world.
The exhibition's title also draws on Walter Benjamin's unfinished The Arcades Project, in which the philosopher considered the Parisian passages as spaces where modern society's collective dreams, commodities and histories could become visible. Nichols extends that thinking through the ideas of French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, particularly his notion of a "poetic economy" — an alternative conception of value rooted less in measurement and profit than in relationships, creativity, experimentation and exchange.
Rather than treating economics simply as finance or commerce, the Biennale approaches the economy as an interconnected infrastructure through which people, materials, energy, knowledge and other forms of value circulate. That perspective becomes especially resonant in Lyon, a city shaped for centuries by trade and textile production and positioned historically as a commercial crossroads.
Three principal venues provide the backbone of the exhibition. At macLYON – Musée d'art contemporain, the emphasis falls on existential questions including life and death, inheritance and debt. At the Musée des Tissus et des Arts décoratifs, works explore relationships, care and exchange. At Les Grandes Locos, a former railway-industrial complex where a 10,000-square-meter hall has been dedicated to artistic production, the focus shifts toward extraction, transformation, circulation and flow. Nichols emphasizes that these are not separate themes but overlapping ways of examining existing — and still imaginable — economic systems.
The choice of locations gives the Biennale an unusually direct relationship to Lyon's economic and material history. The Musée des Tissus, currently closed for renovation, will reopen exceptionally for the event. Founded in the 19th century in connection with the city's silk industry, its holdings encompass some 4,500 years of textile and decorative arts production. Les Grandes Locos, meanwhile, occupies an industrial site inaugurated in 1846 and later used by the SNCF for locomotive maintenance before being transformed into a cultural venue by the Lyon Metropolis.
The exhibition extends well beyond those three spaces. Additional projects will appear at the Institut d'art contemporain / Frac Rhône-Alpes, Musée des Confluences and Fondation Bullukian, as well as in the Croix-Rousse traboules, the garden of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, the Part-Dieu metro station and other locations around Lyon.
Nichols has assembled a broad international field of artists, with a particularly strong presence from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider Pacific. Their practices offer sharply different ways of approaching the Biennale's concerns. Mumbai-based Archana Hande, for example, examines the social histories embedded in materials, technology and systems of labor, connecting artisanal traditions with industrial processes and digital economies.
Australian artist Timo Hogan, a Pitjantjatjara artist from the Western Desert, works with the cultural and spiritual significance of Lake Baker in his Spinifex Lands, balancing the transmission of knowledge with the protection of what must remain sacred. Melbourne-based Tina Stefanou, meanwhile, uses voice, performance, sound and installation to explore labor, care and collective experience, frequently bringing human and non-human participants together.
A recurring element at macLYON, Les Grandes Locos and the Musée des Tissus will be La Fête Permanente, inspired by Filliou's idea of art as a continuous collective process. Furnished with second-hand sofas, armchairs and movable elements, these spaces are intended less as conventional exhibition displays than as places where visitors can sit, meet, listen and participate in conversations, performances, radio programs and other activities involving different sectors of Lyon's social and economic life.
The Biennale will also continue its Biennale en territoires initiative, which develops projects directly with communities across Lyon and the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, while the associated Résonance program encompasses more than 400 events around the Biennale's central concerns.
Running from September 19 through December 13, 2026, the 18th Lyon Biennale proposes the city not simply as a backdrop for contemporary art but as a network to be entered and traversed. Like the traboules themselves, Nichols' exhibition asks visitors to move through different spaces and systems, following unexpected connections between history, labor, materials, care and imagination — passing, in the Biennale's words, from one dream to another.
