Ralph Rugoff to curate 2015 Lyon Biennale

Ralph Rugoff, the director of the Hayward Gallery in London, has been chosen to curate the 2015 Lyon Biennle. Since 1991, the biennale’s artistic director, Thierry Raspail, has chosen a single word from which the individual curators of three successive editions are asked to springboard their curatorial plans from. Rugoff and his two successors in 2017 and 2019, will from work from the word ‘modern’. Raspail explained, ‘Modern is not modernism, nor is it modernity; but it can contain them, grab them, express them. What’s more, we know perfectly well, and have done for a long time – at least since Rimbaud – that “one must be absolutely modern”. Today, everything is modern: the neo-modernism sweeping through the visual arts, the vintage charm at work in design, and the “re-enactment” that turns history into a subjective present.’