Lyon Biennial

How to define the current decade

This publication is concerned with play, mapping, and the experience of a collective writing. Thought of as a history, geography, and contemporary art book, it is the result of a series of delegations, invitations, and programs of those who conceived the event. Bringing together 70 “players” from around the world, divided into two groups according to whether they are artists or critics and exhibition curators, the project was developed around a central question: How to define the current decade. If the task of the first group was to choose responses among those proposed by artists today, the second group, benefiting from an open curatorial proposition, had to sequence these choices or confront them with others. Altogether, these subjectivities, framed by a few rules of presentation find themselves here as participants in an exercise of determining, repositioning, and reframing a decade and an object–art–the course of which is, as the yardstick of all-purpose concepts today, more and more indispensable.

The publication is accompanied by previously unpublished essays by and interviews with Mehdi Belhaj-Kacem, Stefano Boeri, François Cusset, Okwui Enwezor, Michel Houellebecq, Anselm Jappe, Paul Veyne, and Ralph Rugoff.

Awarded in the competition “The most beautiful Swiss books 2007.”