Robert Gabris
17th Biennale de Lyon
21 September 2024 – 5 January 2025
Founded in 1991, the Biennale de Lyon is the most important contemporary art exhibition in France. The 17th edition in 2024, which is titled Les voix des fleuves Crossing the water and curated by Alexia Fabre, invites artists to interrogate and investigate the subject of the waxing and waning relationships of human beings with one another and with their environment.
For this project, the biennial is drawing on the geography of the region, and on the spirit of the Biennale’s new venues: Les Grandes Locos, a former industrial site that was used for maintaining and repairing cargo trains, and the Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie. These spaces are permeated by the question of relationships and of welcoming the other. They embody history, diversity and the invention of communal ways of working. Their walls, which still bear the traces and experiences of the men and women who worked and lived there, still conjure rituals of communal living.
During a research trip to Austria in July 2023 organized by Phileas, curator Alexia Fabre invited Robert Gabris to participate with a new site-specific installation in the industrial space Les Grandes Locos. Gabris’ installation addresses the various meanings of the act of caring and repairing, taking the human body as a starting point for exploration. The work is a continuation of the series This Space Is Too Small For Our Bodies first presented at his solo exhibition at Belvedere 21, Vienna, in 2023-24, for which Gabris created mask-like objects out of paper and cardboard, presenting them alongside textile works and pencil drawings.
Robert Gabris (born 1986 in Hnúšťa, Slovakia, lives and works in Vienna) is an artist whose autobiographically inspired works often deal with questions of identity and the exclusion of minorities. As a Roma and queer artist, Gabris aims to create inclusive spaces combining drawing with installation, sculpture and performance. His work has been shown internationally at documenta 15 (Kassel), Villa Romana (Florence) and Collective by Pure (Shanghai). In 2022, he was awarded the Belvedere Art Award.
This is Robert Gabris’ second collaboration with Phileas, following his participation at the 23rd Biennale of Sydney in early 2024.
