The Rencontres d’Arles captures our world’s state of consciousness. Its photographers, artists, and curators help us to see, to perceive, with keener acuteness, the transformations we are living through.
The festival is more than an international crossroads. Its every edition expresses the bond between Arles and photography through not only the heritage sites selected for exhibitions, but also the inspiration the city’s beauty and light have offered for over 50 years.
AGNÈS VARDA
LA POINTE COURTE, FROM PHOTOGRAPHS TO FILM
Agnès Varda’s contact sheets reveal her photographic journey. When we compare the 800-odd photos she took in Sète with the painstaking selection the young woman undertook in 1953 to prepare her film, we begin to see her vision. These are not film stills of the shooting or the set, but images antedating the idea of the film or forming part of its conception. These reference and scouting photographs, collected on nine sheets, were her inspiration for scenes, atmospheres, even particular shots. Her favorite subjects and motifs are confirmed by their reappearance in contemporary or subsequent prints.
GREGORY CREWDSON
EVENINGSIDE – 2012-2022
This exhibition brings together three bodies of work made between 2012 and 2022. They offer unique insight into a decade of creation and reveal the axes of the universe that has posited Gregory Crewdson as one of the major figures of photography. The trilogy is introduced with the earlier series, Fireflies (1996), stripped of the sets and elaborate postproduction that usually accompany his works. Fireflies stands apart from the rest of his œuvre and was kept away from the public eye for a full decade.
WIM WENDERS
MY POLAROID FRIENDS
„In late 1976, I shot The American Friend in Hamburg and Paris. It starred Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper and was based on the novel Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith. At the time, Polaroid pictures corresponded to what you’d nowadays do on your smart phone. Polaroids were the analog predecessor of instant photography. They truly represented a photographic notebook, only that the cameras spat out printed “originals.” — Wim Wenders
SØSTERSKAP CONTEMPORARY NORDIC PHOTOGRAPHY
Søsterskap highlights photographers’ strong role over several generations in the Nordic countries. The exhibition explores the welfare state from a perspective of intersectional feminism. Often referred to as “the Nordic model,” this system is characterized by a public sector that provides all citizens with social security and welfare services, including daycare and education, and has brought significant improvement to living and working conditions. Basic values underlying the model are openness, tolerance, and the conviction that all people are equal. “The welfare state is a woman’s best friend” is a feminist slogan.
50 YEARS THROUGH THE EYES OF LIBÉRATION
Libération turns 50 in 2023. For fifty years, the newspaper has been following and challenging the times. From the events in Larzac and the election of Mitterrand to the Arab Spring, the war in Chechnya, Metaleurop, the Gilets Jaunes, and Ukraine, through Libération, the world is recounted in images.
ZOFIA KULIK SPLENDOR OF THE ARTISAN
These large photomontages are realized with the artist’s own technique, very meticulous, in her darkroom. They are multiple exposures of dozens of single negatives, directly on photographic paper, through precisely cut masks. This first monographic presentation of Zofia Kulik in France shows the universe of symbols and images created by the artist. But it also reveals the details of her unique technical approach and traces the beginnings of her fascination for the transformed photographic image which still dates from the time of her studies, at the end of the 1960s. Some masterpieces, like her self-portraits inspired by Victorian paintings or the monumental photographic panel Favorite Balance, are the best introduction to this rich world full of cultural references—from antique culture, through medieval imagery to contemporary strategies of historical politics.
LIGHT OF SAINTS A PHOTOGRAPHIC PILGRIMAGE
This exhibition presents a photographic history of the annual pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, during which Gitans, Manouches, Romani, and travelers from France and Europe honor Saint Sara. Despite prevailing hostilities and anti-Gypsyism, the pilgrimage is a proven occasion for reunions, and an important space for social, religious, and artistic expression.
YOHANNE LAMOULÈRE THE RIVER’S CHILDREN
Some of the photographs in the exhibition The River’s Children [Les Enfants du fleuve] are from a large commission by the Ministry of Culture for photojournalists, curated by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The starting point for the project was the discovery of an uninhabited island in the Rhône Delta, in the Camargue. After spending several months there, in 2020 Yohanne Lamoulère led workshops in Port-Saint-Louis du Rhône and Marseille about the subjective idea of insularity and then decided to build a boat from salvaged materials: Anita was the product of a chance encounter between an abandoned barge and a caravan. She sailed in stages, against the current, from the Mediterranean to the Rhône Glacier, documenting and telling the story of an 812-kilometer-long territory accounting for 17% of the surface area of metropolitan France.
MACIEJKA ART HOJA SANTA
Hoja Santa [Holy Leaf] is the story of a journey. It stems from an urgency to understand oneself through the gaze of others: an expression of a primordial mirror. It’s the result of a psychogeographic journey in which Maciejka Art will encounter the need to recompose the pieces of her own soul. A magical and distant place, the Afro-descendant community of the Costa Chica is a fragment of the kaleidoscopic Mexican soul, only recently recognized on historical and political maps.
GARUSH MELKONYAN COSMOVISIÓN
Cosmovisión imagines a possible follow-up to this gesture of throwing a bottle into the interstellar ocean. The video displays extraterrestrial life arriving on Earth, come to meet its residents, exclusively guided by the Golden Record’s vision.
In 1977, NASA launched two space probes transporting two phonograph records dubbed the “Golden Record,” containing, in coded form, documents destined for a potential extraterrestrial intelligence. Including around a hundred photographs as well as music, sounds, and speech from our planet, these documents are intended to describe as exhaustively as possible human life on Earth and, in particular, human civilization.
PHILIPPE CALIA THE AJAIB GHAR ARCHIVE
By inviting the public to leave comments in his artist book, Calia challenges the aura of the exhibit, recognizing that narratives can be appropriated but also contested. Through the title—A Visitor’s Book—he hints at his own dual position as an author: as a French citizen working in India for fifteen years, and as a viewer who has turned into a maker of art himself. Distilling his lifelong exposure to art, Calia leaves his own comments in the form of his drawings. In recalling the “imaginary museum” in our memory, the artist prompts us to acknowledge its imprint on our perception of reality.
MD FAZLA RABBI FATIQ HOME
Created within the lexicon of the pandemic and its effect on the mind and body—death, decay, trepidation, relief—Fatiq’s visceral explorations gesture towards that which lies beyond the frame. Broadly evoking memories of unease and discomfort, Home is punctuated with moments of respite: fleeting points of exhalation; the reassurance of life. While bodies pile up outside, the hibiscus still blooms. In taking on a surrealistic aesthetic, the domestic space assumes a psychological dimension, recalling the interior volatility of the pandemic.
DANIEL WAGENER OPUS INCERTUM
The in-situ installation is an arrangement of prefabricated shelves, industrial racks, crossing the main nave from left to right, filled with images of contemporary “construction sites,” urban views, traces of buildings from the past and present. This modular unit for storing images obstructs the view of the altar and, by replacing the object of worship, becomes the artistic interface of a new cult of consumption. The artist questions the nature of the icon in our contemporary society and encourages us to reflect on the place of the spiritual and its intersection with the material. opus incertum portrays a new reality, seeks to document episodes of urban construction, uncovers what lies behind the ostentation, reveals what is no longer seen.
JACQUES LÉONARD THE NOMAD SPIRIT
The museum is happy to exhibit, in partnership with Fondation Photographic Social Vision of Barcelona and thanks to the generosity of the Jacques Léonard Archives, a selection of over 150 images by Jacques Léonard. His photographs, highly humanist in tendency, record urban life: streets, markets, festivals, amusement parks, sports, fairs, port, and waterfront marked by the development of tourism… His marriage with Rosario Amaya, a Roma woman from the Montjuïc neighborhood, opened the doors of her community. Looking at her with the eyes of a family member, his images form one of the most important collections dealing with Roma culture.
Les Rencontres d’Arles
July 3 — September 24
Arles
