The last Lyon Biennial attracted almost 140,000 visitors, thus confirming that it has become one of the world’s major contemporary art events, as much by the choice of its themes as by the quality of the presentation of the works. By comparison with the Venice Biennial and the Kassel Documenta, Lyon’s Biennial is a newcomer, the present one being just the fourth of its kind. But it is a promising newcomer, nonetheless.
Today, the Lyon Biennial takes up the theme of “L’Autre”.
This fourth Lyon Biennial gives a totally free hand to Harald Szeemann, the general curator, who brings together artists, not only from France but from the four points of the globe, and works produced at very different points in time. The mixing of languages, that of experiences, one’s own and those of the other, that of “the other in the world”: all of this aims at revealing, or re-revealing, horizons that cannot but deepen our knowledge of things.
This exhibition, which will once more make Lyon a European capital of contemporary creativity, will, I hope, generate the same public enthusiasm as before.The requirement for openness, of which it reminds us all, is a part of the necessity, which grows greater every day, to face up to what is not ourselves. It recalls to mind, and puts in perspective, the idea, at once just and simple, that every art, because it is creative, carries within itself its share of truth.

The Minister of Culture