18th Lyon Biennale - Contemporary Art

Press days: 16-18 September 2026
Preview: 17 & 18 September 2026

Artistic director : Isabelle Bertolotti
Curator : Catherine Nichols

“To pass from one dream to another,” the main title of the 18th edition of the Biennale of Contemporary Art draws on the traboules—those distinctive passageways running through Lyon’s courtyards and buildings—to explore how one moves from one mode of perception to another, from one collective dream to another. Lyon, a crossroads of trade and industry, becomes the starting point for a reflection on the economy, approached here as the set of processes through which interdependent beings acquire, transform, and circulate what sustains their existence.

Drawing on the writings of Walter Benjamin and Robert Filliou's Principes d’économie poétique, Catherine Nichols develops a project situated between critique and invention. While Benjamin reveals how capitalism produces a collective dream whose continuity must be interrupted, Filliou proposes that other forms of economy can be explored through artistic and social practices. The Biennale focuses on those moments when the apparent stability of the present begins to fracture, and other imaginaries become possible.

Spread across several emblematic sites in Lyon, the exhibition unfolds through interwoven dimensions: the industrial at the Grandes Locos, the relational at the Musée des Tissus, and the existential at macLYON. Here, the economy extends beyond the monetary to encompass forms of attention, care, relationships, and imagination that structure collective life.

Conceived as a passage, the Biennale invites visitors to move through the city differently and to experiment with alternative ways of making and thinking about the economy.