18th Biennale de Lyon, France
19 September – 13 December 2026
Founded in 1991, the Biennale de Lyon is the most important large-scale festival of contemporary art in France. The 18thedition in 2026 is curated by Catherine Nichols. Her curatorial concept emphasises storytelling, transformation and the role of art in addressing complex social, political and environmental issues.
For the 18th Biennale de Lyon, James Lewis will expand his 2022 work Not just suffering, but all forms of consciousness, a series of sunflower-like, concrete sculptures that appeared to grow from the waste of construction and environmental destruction. Responding to the industrial history of Lyon and its present-day environmental challenges, he will create an installation that combines sculptural growths with sonic material drawn from archival and contemporary sources. The work will consider how plants, infrastructures and humans adapt to hostile environments, and how value is assigned within economies of survival.
James Lewis (born 1986 in London) lives and works in Vienna. His practice explores the entanglement of ecological fragility and technological systems. Working across sculpture, sound and installation, he draws attention to how environments are shaped by industrial processes, datafication and the accumulation of waste materials. His works often evoke botanical or geological forms, yet are built from the debris of human activity, pointing to cycles of extraction, consumption and survival. His work asks how life can adapt after systems of exploitation, and what resilience might look like in their aftermath.
This is his first collaboration with Phileas.
This project was aided by a research trip to Vienna by the curator Catherine Nichols, organised by Phileas in March 2025.
An interview with James Lewis
Descending the stairs into the basement studio of Vienna-based artist James Lewis, I felt I was entering a greenhouse. Twelve large concrete sunflowers rose from the grey speckled floor, their long stems seeming to sway against the chalky white walls. I settled into the comfortable leather sofa, while Lewis sat on a chair framed by the stems of his concrete plants. On the desk behind him, the scale shifted dramatically: the towering sunflowers gave way to detailed botanical illustrations and a small scent bottle.
The scent, developed with his mother, is intended to evoke the aromas she may have encountered on the day she left India in 1963. It is an attempt to reconstruct a memory that is not his own, and one that can never be fully recovered. Lewis is bringing these elements together in a new site-specific installation, entitled The Past is a Foreign Country, supported by Phileas, for the 18th Lyon Biennale (19 September – 12 December 2026). The invitation followed the visit to his studio in March 2025 by Catherine Nichols, the biennale’s curator, as part of Phileas’s Visitor Programme.
Coinciding with the biennale, Lewis will also present The Third House, a solo exhibition at Vienna’s Galerie Hubert Winter, opening on 29 October 2026.
In our conversation, we spoke about the origins of the Lyon commission, the role of scent in reconstructing memory, and the challenge of giving material form to experiences that cannot be fully captured.
Nell Hargrove (NH): What can visitors expect to see when entering your installation at the 18th Lyon Biennale?
James Lewis (JL): The installation will be in a former control tower at Les Grandes Locos [a former industrial site used by the French railway company]. It’s in an office space that pushes out of the building, so it’s simultaneously inside and outside. For me, this embodies a kind of duality that felt right for a work about not quite belonging, or being two things simultaneously.
In the first room, the windows will be whitewashed with diluted chalk powder, the same material used to obscure windows of abandoned shops, but also more recently as a remedy for rising temperatures. The space will be filled with fluorescent yellow light, giving it a dystopian feeling. As with previous installations that have used this yellow light, it signals a warning to me. It’s a way of encouraging the audience to think about the possibility of an impending environmental disaster.
Viewers will then pass into a second space, with a beige carpet on the floor and a dim light. It has the feeling of a room you’ve remembered, rather than one you’ve been in. There’ll be a large duct sculpture that spans the two rooms of the second area, functioning as a prosthetic organ or lung. The sculpture will take in the air from the first room and mix it with a custom-made scent, which is then circulated through the sculpture and exhaled in the final room.
The whole installation treats reconstruction as approximation, as something provisional and made out of what’s missing.
NH: Can you tell us about the twelve concrete plant sculptures you’ve created as part of your new commission for the Lyon Biennale?
JL: I have been developing plant-like sculptures or sunflowers in concrete for a while. Some are currently on show at Kunsthalle Wien, Lebt und arbeitet in Wien: Contemporary Art from Vienna (until 26 October). Every time I add to the series it feels like a community that grows. Each one is made by hand, not cast, so no two are the same. When they come together in a space, they read less as individual objects and more as a gathering.
NH: How are you interpreting Catherine Nichols’s curatorial title for Lyon – To pass from one dream to another? Can you tell me a bit about the conversations you had with her when she came to visit you in your studio?
JL: The title led me to think about how we remember worlds that we don’t have access to. Within this context, the project investigates how worlds are remembered, rebuilt, and ethically reimagined. The new works approach approximation and forgetting as an indication of what cannot be seamlessly carried across time, geography, and political history.
I enjoyed meeting Catherine when she visited my studio. Unbeknownst to me, she had quietly been following my practice since seeing my solo presentation at Frieze London art fair in 2023. As an artist, it often feels like your work disappears into the world without you knowing how it is received, so it was fascinating to learn that she had been engaging with it behind the scenes.
When Catherine came to the studio, she had begun to construct a world around the work. During our intense, inspiring conversation, we talked about why I make work, what I hope it can do, and, above all, the questions that drive my practice. I think I work towards understanding the things I don’t yet know. Much of our conversation centred on those grey areas.
NH: An exciting part of the work you’re producing for Lyon is the creation of a scent. You’re developing it with your mother to recreate the aromas of the day she left India in 1963. How did you begin researching this?
JL: Sometimes my work deals with inheritance and both of my parents appear in my practice, though in very different ways. Collaborating with my mother and excavating her very unstable memory of a day from her childhood has, in a way, given me access to something she experienced. But through the process of making this work, I also realised that I was learning about her imagination. A lot of what she thinks she remembers is also how she imagines India to have been.
NH: Have you travelled to India together to do some of this research?
JL: No. I’ve never been, and my mother hasn’t returned to this day. For her and her family, it was really about leaving something behind. She didn’t just leave momentarily, her life changed. But as my mother gets older, and through this collaboration, we’ve understood that we would like to go back and have developed more of an interest in visiting India together.
NH: Perhaps we can talk about the research material and the creation of the scent. Was there a moment when you thought, ‘this is it – this is the scent’?
JL: I think the act of trying to recreate something that is lost or forgotten is the most important part of the project. We didn’t have a Eureka moment, but I think I would have questioned the validity of that moment anyway, had it appeared. The Eureka moment is interesting in this context. It implies that a factual recreation of that ‘smellscape’ would have been possible. There were moments when my mum smelled the samples and recognised something or experienced a strange sense of familiarity.
So, what emerged from the process was something much more nuanced than a factual recreation.
The scent was made in collaboration with RYOKO Senses Salon in Berlin. They specialise in using natural materials to create scents and olfactory installations. I discovered that the founder, Ryoko Hori, was deeply rooted in Japanese Shinto philosophy but had also taken a very moving and important trip to India with her father, which impacted her work.
I shared lots of family photographs, archival material, weather reports, civic data, descriptions from my mother, along with writing and documents from places such as Kew Gardens, London’s major centre for botanical research, classification, and material collection.
The key part was figuring out how to move from statistical or analytical information and convert the data into a scent, something that is emotional and ephemeral.
NH: Which samples were particularly important to finding the scent?
JL: One of the notes in the composition is kewda, an essential oil that, interestingly, shares the same aromatic compound that is naturally present in basmati rice.
Rice is an integral part of the personal narrative as to why my family left India. The fable goes: one morning, when my grandad went to collect the newspaper from the front door, he saw that somebody had left a bag of rice on their doorstep. In some parts of Indian culture, rice on the doorstep indicates a bad omen. So, with this potential curse, the family fled India. It was important to me that the scent somehow paid homage to this superstition, especially because rice was really crucial to their departure.
Here it is.
[James passes over a small bottle of scented liquid]
NH: Wow, it has a very woody note as well.
JL: Yes! We didn’t want to create a cliché of India. I kept returning to the idea that the scent shouldn’t feel complete. Like it had loss, or something unresolved written into its composition.
NH: It reminds me of a house with wooden furniture. There is a slightly dark interior, but light is coming in from outside.
JL: Exactly! It’s really interesting that the scent creates an image of a domestic setting for you. Much of what I’m trying to do in my work is create a representation of a domestic space.
NH: To quote your mother from your 2025 video work, The Third House, she talks about ‘a kind of architecture made of errors’ when trying to remember her home in India. Could you tell me a little more about what this means?
JL: That video was a subtitled conversation with my mum, where I asked her to describe the house she grew up in, in India. As she tries to remember the layout of the house, she describes the act of remembering as ‘an architecture made of errors’. It was a really interesting terminology for me and her phrasing helped me understand my work a bit better. So, rather unexpectedly, my mother helped me to articulate what I’ve been trying to do for the last fifteen years.
NH: It’s interesting that sometimes it takes a generation of space to then re-enter these discussions with slightly more perspective, which isn’t quite so first-hand. Through these conversations with your mother, you’ve been able to develop something together, while keeping your own agency within that, and translate it with her.
JL: Through this work, I’m made to ask my mum questions. There was something really comforting about being given a space that legitimises me asking my mother questions.
NH: Yes, definitely, it’s wonderful.
Excitingly, at the same time as your presentation in Lyon, your work will be presented at Galerie Hubert Winter in Vienna. How are you thinking about these two spaces together? Is The Third House the connecting point between your presentation at the Lyon Biennale and Galerie Hubert Winter?
JL: The show at Galerie Hubert Winter will move into a new area of The Third House, my theoretical framework.
For this exhibition, I’d like to include memories of my father. As you walk into the space, you’ll be walking under a suspended ceiling. The first work in the show has a lot to do with weight and suspension.
I became increasingly fascinated by Le Grand K, the standard kilogramme that is kept in a locked vault at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris. By definition, this object weighed exactly one kilogramme. It couldn’t be wrong because it was the kilogramme, and everything else in the world was measured against it. When it was made in 1879, dozens of near-identical official copies, sister standards, were distributed to countries around the world to serve as national references. Periodically over decades, these copies were brought back to Paris and compared against the original. But over about a century, the original lost mass and no one knows why.
I think of Le Grand K as an allegory for inheritance – you’re handed a standard and you measure yourself against it. But it drifts, it loses mass and, at times, definition. So, the two shows are really the same house in two different cities. Lyon is related to spatial memory and its instability. The exhibition in Vienna asks you to stand beneath something that is slowly, unaccountably redefining a classification.
James Lewis (born 1986 in London, UK) is an artist of South Asian diaspora based in Vienna, Austria. His practice explores the relationship between empirical data and embodied knowledge, investigating how systems of classification, sensory memory, and material traces shape lived experience.
He has exhibited internationally at institutions including MassArt Art Museum (Boston), Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (Recklinghausen), Leopold Museum (Vienna), Kunstverein Salzburg (Salzburg), Fondazione Benetton (Treviso), Mostyn (Wales) and CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (Bordeaux). He is represented by Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna, and is currently a visiting lecturer at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna and the University of Arts, Linz. He is also an associate mentor at Conditions, an alternative art school in his hometown, Croydon.
