Lyon Biennale

Major contemporary art exhibition known for its thematic curation

Founded in 1991 in the wake of Thierry Raspail's "October of the Arts" festival (1984), the Biennale de Lyon was conceived to give France a major recurring international contemporary art exhibition after the closure of the Paris Biennale in 1985. Across more than three decades it has built a reputation for testing successive curators against a sustained editorial vision, for activating Lyon's industrial heritage as exhibition space, and — through the Résonance program launched in 2007 — for extending its reach into the wider Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region.