Hans Schabus
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 Hans Schabus to participate in the 17th Biennale de Lyon. For the occasion, Schabus created a sculptural intervention at Les Grandes Locos to investigate the history of the space, heavy industry in general, and the realities of working in such an environment.
Hans Schabus (born 1970 in Watschig, Austria) is an internationally acclaimed sculptor and draughtsman whose works focus on physical space, and how the object and viewer stand in relation to one another. His large-scale works are assembled using both found and created objects, often as a personal response to a specific environment and the materials that form it. Schabus represented Austria at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, and his work was exhibited at the 6th Berlin Biennale in 2010, the 16th Biennale of Sydney in 2008 and manifesta 4 in Frankfurt am Main in 2002. Recent institutional exhibitions include Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunsthalle Darmstadt; Salzburger Kunstverein; mumok, Vienna; and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, among others. Since 2012, Schabus has been a Professor in the Department of Sculpture and Space at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
This is his second collaboration with Phileas, following his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Darmstadt in 2017.
