Eight artists from Aotearoa have been confirmed as participating in the 18th Lyon Biennale, opening at multiple venues across the city of Lyon on 19 September 2026.
Fiona Clark, Ngahina Hohaia (Taranaki Iwi, Te Atiawa, Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāti Mutunga, Parihaka), Maureen Lander MNZM (Ngāpuhi, Te Hikutū), Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky M’Baye, Sriwhana Spong, Michael Stevenson, Ashleigh Taupaki (Ngāti Hako, Ngāti Rangitihi, Ngāti Kahungunu) and Luke Willis Thompson will each present works in the Biennale following research visits by Artistic Director Isabelle Bertollotti and Curator Catherine Nichols to Aotearoa in May 2025 and February 2026.
About the 18th Lyon Biennale
The 2026 edition of the Biennale will devote special attention to Oceania – conceived not as a mere spotlight, but as a space of relation and movement.
Titling the exhibition To pass from one dream to another, Australian-born, Berlin-based curator, Catherine Nichols has chosen to centre this exhibition on the notion of economy — not in the conventional sense, but as articulated by French artist Robert Filliou: a “poetic economy” that intertwines art with life. Rarely explored from this angle, it proves profoundly revealing of our world’s state. Viewed through the lens of exchanges and relationships, it probes the ripple effects on local and global ecosystems.
Focusing on economy - a recurring theme in her prior research - felt entirely natural to Nichols as she engaged with the region, and Lyon in particular: a city of trade since antiquity, a key Silk Road hub, a major economic powerhouse and a fluvial crossroads. Her thinking crystallised upon discovering the traboules. These iconic Lyonnaise passageways, whose name derives from the Latin trans-ambulare (“to pass through”), once allowed workers to move swiftly between streets via interior courtyards, staircases and corridors. In the 19th century, the silk workers known as the Canuts used them to carry fabric rolls sheltered from the rain. They later gained fame during World War II as secret routes for the Resistance.
It was this notion of passage - which she makes central to her vision - that shaped her overall approach. Inviting us to follow her narrative, Nichols guides us through atypical, historic sites, and above all, with this new edition, to “pass from one dream to another.”
Artists from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region bring practices rooted in histories of colonialism, extraction and circulation, as well as contested sovereignties. Their works probe the economies underpinning these narratives, their value systems, the intergenerational responsibilities they entail, and the modes of transmission they enable, resonating with Lyon’s own material and political realities. This dialogue does not simply expand the frame, but shifts its coordinates, revealing other ways of inhabiting the world and imagining interdependencies.
The Lyon Biennale has been a leading contemporary art event, supporting the creation and presentation of new and existing works, since its inception in 1991. Each Biennale attracts almost 300,000 visitors including 9,000 arts professionals and media from around the world.
Read Catherine Nichols full introduction to the artistic project here.
For a full list of artists currently confirmed to participate, and more about the Biennale, click here.
Introducing the artists
Fiona Clark
Born in 1954 in Inglewood, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Lives and works in Tikorangi, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Fiona Clark’s photographic practice is rooted in long-term relationships grounded in collaboration and care. Her images attend to communities and environments often excluded from mainstream visibility, tracing lives, histories and forms of belonging across different contexts. Through a documentary approach, she considers how bodies, lands and identities are shaped within wider systems of value. Her photographs examine the effects of extractive economies on everyday life, while remaining closely connected to community histories, activism and the cultural memory of marginalised groups in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Fiona Clark is represented in Aotearoa New Zealand by Lett Thomas.
Ngahina Hohaia (Taranaki Iwi, Te Atiawa, Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāti Mutunga, Parihaka)
Born in 1975 in Taranaki, Aotearoa New Zealand, where she lives and works
Legacies of resistance and collective memory shape Ngahina Hohaia’s practice. A Māori artist from a lineage of activists, she draws on inherited knowledge systems and tools for survival to create large-scale fibre and multi-sensory installations. Her works testify as material witnesses to the persistence of colonial violence and are conceived as means to restore territories, both physical and as spaces of knowledge. They function simultaneously as memorial forms and acts of renewal.
Ngahina's work at the Lyon Biennale has been generously supported by Gill and Paul Kendrick.
Ngahina Hohaia shows work in Aotearoa New Zealand with Tim Melville Gallery
Maureen Lander MNZM (Ngāpuhi, Te Hikutū)
Born in 1942 in Rawene, Aotearoa New Zealand
Lives and works in Whangamata, Aotearoa New Zealand
Weaving forms the foundation of Maureen Lander’s practice, which extends across installation and spatial composition. A Māori artist, she works with materials such as harakeke (New Zealand flax) and muka, a fibre extracted from it, bringing ancestral knowledge into dialogue with contemporary forms. Her work explores how relationships between material, genealogy, kinship and place are structured, remembered and carried. Attentive to the transmission of knowledge across territories and generations, her installations create spaces in which inherited practices are reactivated and sustained within the present.
Maureen Lander shows work in Aotearoa New Zealand with Tim Melville Gallery
Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky M’Baye
Born in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand
Lives and works in Paris, France.
Through moving image and installation, Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky M’Baye questions the material and immaterial conditions through which belonging is shaped and experienced. Her practice is grounded in iterative, ritualistic process of thinking through making, where research, gesture and image evolve in close relation. Drawing on genealogical and archival fragments, she constructs narratives that move between speculation and poetic form. Attentive to colonial and diasporic histories, she asks how the intercultural body navigates an inheritance that is unfixed and fragmented, and how historical complexity and cultural incompleteness might act as mediums from which critical, self-preserving narratives emerge.
Sriwhana Spong
Born in 1979 in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand
Lives and works in London, England
Sriwhana Spong’s practice engages film, performance and installation, with an attention to gesture, repetition, and material transformation. Informed by choreography, her work considers how movement and matter register and reconfigure memory. Through processes of staining, sequencing and translation, materials become sites where histories settle and shift. Her more recent works turn toward modes of representing the female body, examining how expression is shaped by social norms.
Sriwhana Spong is represented in Aotearoa New Zealand by Lett Thomas.
Michael Stevenson
Born in 1964 in Inglewood, Aotearoa New Zealand
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
Michael Stevenson’s installations draw on processes of historical research and reconstruction. Working with archival materials, models and spatial dispositifs, he examines how economic, technological and ideological systems take form and circulate. His work often focuses on sites of knowledge production, where ideas hover between education, belief and governance. By reconfiguring these structures in material terms, Stevenson makes visible the conditions through which value is defined and transmitted, approaching history not as a fixed narrative, but as an active field of interpretation and use.
Michael Stevenson is represented in Aotearoa New Zealand by Lett Thomas.
Ashleigh Taupaki (Ngāti Hako, Ngāti Rangitihi, Ngāti Kahungunu)
Born in 1997 in Waitākere, Aotearoa New Zealand
Lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand
Ashleigh Taupaki examines relationships to whenua (land) through installation, drawing and research. Working with minimalism and text, she addresses histories of extraction and dispossession while reasserting the authority of whānau (family), hapū (sub-tribe) and iwi (tribe). Her work is grounded in specific sites and archival records, where material and narrative remain closely linked. Extending beyond documentation, she proposes forms that measure loss and register absence, opening questions around restitution, responsibility and the long temporalities of land.
Luke Willis Thompson
Born in 1988 in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, where he lives and works
Through moving image, performance and installation, Luke Willis Thompson interrogates the politics of representation and the legacies of colonial histories. His films employ restrained formal strategies to construct works that operate as counter-archives, foregrounding absence, silence and refusal. Drawing on the visual codes of broadcast media and political communication, his practice challenges dominant regimes of visibility, while staging conditions in which historical violence and its after lives can be critically reimagined.
Luke Willis Thompson is represented in Aotearoa New Zealand by Coastal Signs.
Introducing Catherine Nichols, Curator 18th Lyon Biennale
Catherine Nichols
Catherine Nichols is an arts and literary scholar, curator and writer, whose work spans contemporary art, cultural history, and interdisciplinary research. Known for her ability to weave compelling narratives through exhibitions and cultural projects, Nichols has consistently explored art's potential to address complex social, political and environmental issues while fostering space for thought and conviviality.
Originally from Australia and based in Berlin, she has directed numerous major exhibitions and long term projects across Europe. In 2022, Catherine served as curator for the European Nomadic Biennale Manifesta 14 Prishtina, titled It matters what worlds world worlds: how to tell stories otherwise, spanning 25 sites that examined the transformative power of storytelling. From 2019 to 2021 she co-led Beuys 2021: 100 Jahre Joseph Beuys, a critical enquiry into the legacy of German artist Joseph Beuys, alongside Eugen Blume.
Catherine is currently a curator at Hamburger Bahnhof - Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin. Her recent projects include Petrit Halilaj - An Opera Out of Time (2025/2026), Delcy Morelos - Madre (2025), Alexandra Pirici - Attune (2024) and Joseph Beuys - Werke aus der Sammlung der Nationalgalerie (2024).
From October 2026 Catherine will co-lead Manifesta, with Emilia van Lynden recently appointed as General Director and Catherine as Artistic Director.
In 2026, Frieze magazine named Catherine one of the six curators to watch.
Partners and Supporters
The participation of all the artists from Aotearoa in the Lyon Biennale has been generously supported by Creative New Zealand. Sincere thanks to Gill and Paul Kendrick for their support of Ngahina Hohaia's presentation and to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Foundation and Govett-Brewster Foundation for enabling Taarati Taiaroa, Ringahāpai Kaitakatū Ngā Toi Māori | Curator Contemporary Māori Art, to travel to Lyon to support the artists. We look forward to announcing additional supporters in the near future. The Artistic Director of the Lyon Biennale was introduced to Aotearoa New Zealand through Christopher and Charlotte Swasbrook and OCAA is grateful for their ongoing support.
