SAHA supports 18th Biennale de Lyon - Institut d’Art Contemporain within the scope of Can Yıldırım and Lalin Mercan’s new project between 19 September – 13 December 2026 as part of the Jeune Création Internationale.

“To pass from one dream to another,” the main title of the 18th edition of the Biennale of Contemporary Art draws on the traboules—those distinctive passageways running through Lyon’s courtyards and buildings—to explore how one moves from one mode of perception to another, from one collective dream to another. Lyon, a crossroads of trade and industry, becomes the starting point for a reflection on the economy, approached here as the set of processes through which interdependent beings acquire, transform, and circulate what sustains their existence.”

Can Yıldırım and Lalin Mercan participate in the Biennale, under the artistic direction of Isabelle Bertolotti and curated by Catherine Nichols, with their project Superanxiety: Nexium, which explores anxiety as a condition that shapes perception and experience, creating an immersive environment suspended between exposure and protection, ingestion and relief, and the anticipation and suppression of catastrophe.

Can Yıldırım and Lalin Mercan develop complementary practices centred on storytelling, images, and signs. Can Yıldırım explores the contemporary saturation of images and texts, bringing forth moments of rupture and intensity from fragments. Through drawing, installation, and sculpture, Lalin Mercan constructs hybrid narratives shaped by mythological, feminist, and autobiographical references. Working together, they create open-ended narrative forms in which images, objects, and stories become spaces for the reconfiguration of meaning.

About Jeune Création Internationale and Biennale de Lyon

For over twenty years, Jeune création internationale has placed emerging talent at the heart of the Lyon Biennale – Contemporary Art. Originally launched as Rendez-vous in 2002 by the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon and École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon, it was joined the following year by the Institut d’art contemporain and by la Biennale de Lyon itself in 2015. Jeune création internationale stands out as a distinctive platform within the French art scene, where professionalisation, production and dissemination are tightly interwoven to provide artists with a rigorous, supportive framework.