Les Grandes Locos, Biennale de Lyon
19.09.26 - 13.12.26
Sunflowers are ruderal plants, which means that they take root in rubble and disturbed sites. In James Lewis’s work, twelve concrete sunflowers stand in yellow fluorescent light. Fixed in place, they cannot follow the cycles of growth and decay that let ruderals colonise unstable terrain, remaining suspended between adaptation and petrification.
The installation developed from conversations between the artist and his mother about the house in India where she grew up before leaving for Britain in 1963. In her memory, rooms changed size and doors led nowhere. Lewis allows those incons-istencies to organise the space. A metal duct runs along the floor like a prosthetic lung. It draws outside air into the otherwise closed room and releases a scent developed with his mother to evoke the bay in Mumbai on the morning she left. The smell gives that departure a sensory presence without recovering what memory has lost.
Text by Catherine Nichols, Curator, 18th Biennale de Lyon
Photos: Jesús Alberto Benítez
With the support of the Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sports of the Republic of Austria; With the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum; In collaboration with Phileas-The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art ; With the support of Fluxus Art Projects
The Past is a Foreign Country, 2026, incorporates a custom scent developed in collaboration with RYOKO Senses Salon and uses an HVAC scent diffuser kindly loaned by Amster.