The 18th Biennale de Lyon Turns the City’s Hidden Passageways Into a Theme

The Biennale de Lyon opens its 18th edition on 19 September 2026, following press days from the 16th to the 18th, and runs through 13 December across several sites in the city, among them the Musée des Tissus et des Arts Décoratifs and the contemporary art museum macLYON. Curator Catherine Nichols, working under longtime artistic director Isabelle Bertolotti, has titled this edition To pass from one dream to another, and built it around Lyon’s traboules — the covered passageways, unique to the city, that let residents cut invisibly between parallel streets. The Biennale uses that architecture as a working metaphor for how a society moves from one collective imagination to the next, across economics, ecology, and everyday social practice.

Lyon’s biennial was founded in 1991 by Thierry Raspail, then director of the city’s Musée d’art contemporain, at a moment when very few European cities outside Venice ran a recurring international contemporary art exhibition of any real scale. More than three decades on, it has become one of the anchors of the European biennial circuit, known in particular for treating its host city’s own architecture and history — rather than a neutral white-cube backdrop — as part of the exhibition itself, a habit this edition continues directly by building its entire conceptual framework out of a piece of Lyon’s own urban fabric.

Full venue details, opening hours, and programming for 2026 are on the Biennale de Lyon’s official site. Dates, venue information, and a source-linked summary are also on Art Fair’s 18th Biennale de Lyon listing.