Liesl Raff
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, Alexia Fabre invited Liesl Raff to participate in the 17th Biennale de Lyon. Raff created a new installation in Les Grandes Locos formed of a 14-metre-long passage that visitors can walk through. Latex, a material which Raff has explored and used repeatedly in recent years, covers the walls of the passage.
Liesl Raff (born 1979 in Stuttgart, Germany) studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and stage design at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz. For her most recent project in Vienna, presented at fjk3 - Contemporary Art Space in collaboration with Wiener Festwochen, Raff incorporated a stage for live performance events into a solo exhibition of her objects and full-room installations.
This is Phileas’ second collaboration with Liesl Raff. For her first, taking place a few weeks earlier in early September 2024, Raff represented Austria at the 15th Gwangju Biennale in 2024. Commissioned by Phileas and co-funded with the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, her exhibition marks the first national presentation of Austria at the Gwangju Biennale.
