Biennale de Lyon Art Contemporain 2026
Catherine Nicols, Curator of 18 Biennale de Lyon Art Contemporain

“To pass from one dream to another, the main title of this biennale edition, draws upon German philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project, 1927-1940). In this sprawling fragment, a “theater of all [his] struggles and all [his] ideas, Benjamin examines how urban environments, particularly the Parisian arcades, shape the collective dreams and experiences of society. He treats the arcades as threshold spaces in which the dreamworld to modernity becomes legible. Within these pas-sages, where traces of past lives, forgotten movements and invisible labour persist, history does not unfold as a continuous process but appears in moments of arrest – brief constellations in which its underlying structures are suddenly revealed. “Every epoch,” he writes, “not only dreams the one to follow but, in thus dreaming, precipitates its awakening.”

Catherine Nicols, Curator of 18 Biennale de Lyon Art Contemporain