COURTESY LYON BIENNALE
The Lyon Biennale announced today that Emma Lavigne, the director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, will curate the biennial’s 2017 edition. Lavigne has already given her biennale a title—“Printemps cosmique,” or “Cosmic Spring.” It will focus on “a subversive, chaotic, and ‘non-natural’ garden,” a release says.
Though Lavigne’s name may not be well known in America, she is currently one of Europe’s most important curators. Before she became director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, in 2014, she was a curator at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where she notably staged a number of shows of art by women. In 2009, she staged one of the French museum’s most significant shows, “Elles@centrepompidou,” a rehang of the Pompidou’s permanent collection that featured solely work by women.
Lavigne has also put together a number of retrospectives that have struck a chord with international audiences. Among them are the Pompdiou’s Pierre Huyghe show, which traveled to LACMA in 2014; Cité de la Musique’s Christian Marclay survey; and the Pompidou’s Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster retrospective, which will travel to the K20 Düsseldorf, Germany, in April. More recently, Lavigne curated a show about Warhol’s connections to the New York underground scene and a one-person Kimsooja exhibition for the Centre Pompidou-Metz, and organized the 2015 Venice Biennale’s French Pavilion, which featured work by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot.