Oliver Beer's 'Resonance Project (The Cave)' The Standout Works at the 2024 Biennale de Lyon

By Sarah Belmont 

For the first time, in 2022, the Biennale de Lyon expanded its footprint, displaying artwork across the France’s third largest city, which brought in 274,225 visitors, with nearly half being under 26. For its 2024 edition, the Biennale has taken its expansion a step further by extending outside the city to the towns of Brioude and Charlieu, alongside nine venues in Lyon. While the traditional Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon (macLyon) hosts around a third of the 78 exhibiting artists, Les Grandes Locos, a former train maintenance center, and the Cité internationale de la Gastronomie, a 12th-century hospital recently repurposed into a cultural center for food and cuisine, are new sites for the recurring exhibition’s 17th edition.

With the title “Crossing the water,” this Lyon Biennale offers artworks, many of which are new commissions, that are all about relationships. Organized by guest curator Alexia Fabre, director of the Beaux Arts de Paris school, and Biennale artistic director Isabelle Bertolotti, the exhibition explores how one approaches differences and what that can teach us. Fabre’s intention was to create a pathway along the Rhône, which she described as “a metaphor for all waterways that connect to form a stronger current,” which she connected to the 15 arrondissements of Lyon’s metropolitan area and the wider Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, the regional government of which coproduced several projects, including Mona Cara’s breathtaking tapestry Le Cactus.

Below, a look at nine outstanding works on view at the 2024 Lyon Biennale, which runs through January 5.

Oliver Beer 

Oliver Beer’s installation is, without a doubt, the climax of the Biennale’s display at Les Grandes Locos’s display. The artist had initially conceived of this work when he first participated in the Lyon Biennale a dozen years ago. When he was finally granted access to La Grotte de Font-de-Gaume, Palaeolithic caves located in the Dordogne department in southwest France, Beer invited eight performers—Jean-Christophe Brizard, eee gee, Mélissa Laveaux, Mo’Ju, Hamed Sinno, Michiko Takahashi, Rufus Wainwright, and Woodkid—to each sing their earliest musical memory and a melody of Beer’s choice, so that he could merge their voices into the ultimate polyphony.

This acoustic journey has been adapted into an immersive, two-floor installation, called Resonance Project (The Cave), 2024, consisting of eight screens that switch on and off intermittently. Each performer appears singing a cappella and holding a lamp, as if they were archaeologists exploring the site’s murals and crevasses. Resonance Project’s underground gallery hosts paintings that translate this musical experience pictorially. Beer poured pigments collected in the caves onto canvases that he had laid flat atop speakers playing the sounds recorded on site, the vibrations serving as the paintbrush. The video runs 30 minutes, but I found myself having trouble leaving after just one screening.