Artist Portraits - Opening Ceremony
Blaise Adilon

Produced alongside his professional work as a photographer, bridging commissioned assignments and personal practice, these portraits reflect the encounters, shared affinities and enduring presence of artists throughout the Biennale and the major exhibitions that have shaped the history of MAC Lyon.

Far beyond their documentary value, they form a sensitive archive of contemporary art while revealing the distinctive vision of Blaise Adilon.

The exhibition also presents Berlin 1986, a seminal series in his artistic practice. Created in a city still divided, these photographs mark the beginning of an approach that runs through his entire body of work: moving photography beyond its purely representational function. The act of taking the picture is no longer an end in itself, but the starting point for an exploration of our relationship to the world through the specific possibilities of the photographic medium. This investigation continues in Disturbed Memories (2020), where traces of history, the past embedded in places and the fragility of the visible become the material of a photographic language.

By bringing these bodies of work into dialogue, the exhibition highlights the connections between documentary practice and artistic inquiry, underscoring the continuity of a gaze that, for more than forty years, has explored the relationships between image, time and memory.