The book of the 12th edition of the international exhibition, curated by Icelandic curator Gunnar B. Kvaran.
For the 12th Biennale de Lyon, curator Gunnar B. Kvaran has invited artists from all over the world who work in the
narrative field and use art to experiment with the modalities and mechanisms of storytelling. The exhibition gives pride of place to the ingenuity and inventiveness of contemporary artists in undoing mainstream narrative codes and off-the-peg plotting devices in order to tell new stories differently.
The art of these artist-storytellers comes in many and varied forms and uses a wealth of different registers, materials and techniques. It highlights the way (or rather, ways) in which young artists of today—according to whether they work in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa or North America—are imagining the narratives of tomorrow: narratives that do without the suspense and excitement of globalized fiction as practiced in Hollywood, on television, or in the best-sellers of world literature. Theirs are totally new narratives that defamiliarise us with the world and restore the deep-rooted strangeness and complexity that classic storytelling devices have always sought to iron out or to stifle. These are art narratives that enable us to see and understand the world in a new light and more intelligibly.
