Biennale 2025

The 2025 Biennale gravitates around sonic and musical questions—its graphic translations, interferences, and distortions.

“Noise” - Biennale’s major group exhibition embraces this theme, exploring it through its most artistic, experimental, and technological facets. This term refers to quarrels, disputes, and especially dissonance. The sound of “good trouble,” a fertile perturbation undermining the linearity of narratives. As interference in this sense, it’s a healthy response to facile answers. At scale it enables us to break with the linearity of narratives, whereas some people want those narratives to be rewritten by the spectacular drop in their support and conditioning. It is discomfort, it is the noisy newness, it is the fracture point, the breaking point. Depending on scale, it enables a move away from narrative linearity as art history has traditionally been taught. Some have played with this mischievously. Sir Ernst Gombrich, for instance, wrote his Story of Art for popular and adolescent audiences, using mass iconography with easily accessible reproductions.

Noise proposes an incidental and interrupted history. A history of instruments. While the relationship between music and the visual arts has been widely studied—particularly around transcription and interpretation—very few investigations have focused on how graphic design and its media influence music itself. Chaumont turns its attention to this lesser-explored terrain, revisiting both historical and contemporary artistic movements.

The exhibition presents works by: Atelier Tout va Bien, ABM Studio, Brigade cynophile (Félicité Landrivon), Jules Chéret, Julie Doriath, Le Futur, H5, Helmo, Pia-Melissa Laroche, Roxane Maillet & Auriane Preudhomme, M/M (Paris), Hélène Marian, Studio Dumbar, Rosemarie Tissi, Niklaus Troxler, Sylvia Tournerie, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Karolina Pietrzyk, Tobias Wenig, Jul Quanouai, and Simon Saint-Hillier and Pierre Vanni.