Erwan Sene

b.1991 Paris, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

The work of Sene is based on a sculptural corpus that extends over several levels and is composed in the future perfect tense. Letting himself slide along the slope of a multidimensional everyday life that he reimagines in all kinds of enigmatic tales, his practice reconsiders his own way of living and digesting the objects around him. He creates staging with a vast array of materials, between baroque remanence and day-to-day surrealism, and broaches the themes of language and science fiction. He develops strange ecosystems, a set of vibrant, dystopian and interconnected urban furniture that communicates through a language devised by the artist. 



Instagram : @erwansene
Email : erwansene@gmail.com  


Sene has exhibited work at 18eme Biennale de Lyon, Aranya Art Center China, Collection Lambert Avignon,  City SALTS Birsfelden Switzerland, Frac des pays de la Loire Nantes, Liebaert Project Kortijk Belgium, MoCo Montpellier, COUNCIL+ Berlin, Espace Niemeyer Paris, Balice Hertling Paris, High Art Paris.

As Musician he release his first album JUnQ on PAN (2023) and performed music in venue like Berghain Berlin, Nuits Sonores, Kanal Centre Pompidou and composed the soundtrack for the ballet Drip Tekhne (Choreography Adam Linder, 2024) at The Royal Danish Playhouse in Copenhagen and Biennale Danza 2026 in Venice.

18eme Biennale de Lyon 
Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon

September 19 - December 13 2026

Curated by Catherine Nichols

Dubtraction, 2026

The project situates itself within a history of sound technologies used as instruments of influence and bodily control. The scientist Harold Burris-Meyer embodies a mid-twentieth-century acoustic modernity in which theatre, industry and warfare pursue the same research: to entertain, soothe, frighten and steer behaviour through sound. From stage devices to military acoustic decoys, he demonstrates that frequency acts directly on bodies, below conscious awareness.

The installation transposes this question into a fictional food-service space, invoking Decoder (Klaus Maeck and Muscha, 1984), a paranoid post-punk film in which FM, a solitary young man, tracks the muzak looping through fast-food restaurants, convinced it controls consumers through subliminal messages. He records it, manipulates it, reverses it, injects riots and animal cries into it, and produces an anti-muzak that he broadcasts as a weapon. William Burroughs, who appears in the film, had theorised this in The Electronic Revolution: the tape recorder as a device for destabilising crowds, recorded sound turned back against those who use it to control.

Everything appears neutral. Yet the space is divided into micro sound-zones, imperceptible on first listening. Some frequencies encourage lingering, others shorten the time spent there. A low, almost inaudible frequency alters the perception of time. A high-frequency tension makes stopping more difficult. Certain zones hold bodies without constraining them, like a storyteller beginning a tale in the street without knowing who will take the bait. One lingers without quite knowing why, adjusts one's pace, turns back. The visitor thinks they are crossing a neutral space; they are already inside the narrative.