00s – The History of a Decade that has not yet been named

The curators of the ninth Lyon Biennial approached the task of mapping the moment in contemporary art playfully: by commissioning a polyphonic history and geography book. With 70 "players" from around the world, the "game" of how to define the decade unfolded via a series of delegations, invitations and programs in which artists proposed their responses and critics and curators sequenced and challenged them, in turn suggesting artists of their own. Reframing the unfolding present from within, creatively rethinking the role of the artist as well as that of serious play, and reconsidering the now-ubiquitous and decreasingly authoritative biennial exhibition, these myriad voices, framed by only a few rules, became participants in an exercise in collective self-determination. This lavishly illustrated publication, designed by the renowned Parisian firm M/M and edited by Biennial curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Stéphanie Moisdon, includes previously unpublished essays by Michel Houellebecq, Okwui Enwezor and Ralph Rugoff, and functions as a manual for "a decade yet to be named a present that is endlessly arriving."