Arles – Les Rencontres de la Photographie 2024: The Artistik Rezo selection of exhibitions to see absolutely!

This summer, we will live mainly to the rhythm of sport! But for those who think that “Summer Body” is the name of a new cocktail… detox, you will have the choice between festivals, live shows and photo exhibitions! Passing through Arles for the 2024 edition of the Rencontres Photographiqueswe offer you a selection of exhibitions that you absolutely must not miss…

1- Mary Ellen Mark – Met
Espace Van Gogh – July 1 to September 29 – 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Guided by humanist ideals, American documentary photographer, storyteller, and portraitist Mary Ellen Mark focused her attention on people from diverse backgrounds who led lives very different from her own. In addition to celebrities of all kinds, Mark was particularly drawn to the disenfranchised and marginalized by society.

2- Debi Cornwall – Model Citizens
MONOPRIX Space – July 1 to September 29 – From 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

For ten years, Debi Cornwall has explored the fictions that shape America’s view of itself. Her striking, precisely composed documentary photographs are intended more to provoke reaction than to inform. They invite a closer look at the embodiment, exercise, and normalization of state power.
This exhibition includes two series of works constituting the counterparts of the same question: what stories and strategies does power imagine in the face of disturbing realities?

3- Japanese female photographers from the 1950s to the present day
What a joy to see you [I’m So Happy You Are Here]
Archbishop’s Palace – July 1 to September 29 – 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

This exhibition unveils a wide range of photographic approaches based on the experiences and perspectives of Japanese women on the world, history, and society in which they live. It reveals the abundance of their creativity through photographs, installations, videos, and books. With a particular focus on the period from the 1950s to the present, Quelle joie de vous voir presents more than twenty-five artists from different generations. Some of them have been recognized in recent decades for their essential contributions to the history of the medium; others have developed a practice of equal importance without being known to the general public.

4- In the name of the name, The sensitive surfaces of graffiti
Sainte-Anne Church – July 1 to September 29 – 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Graffiti patinates the precarious material of reality. In pure loss, it is a feeling, an attitude, a modus operandi. Freed from its aesthetic, graffiti is a mental and physical relationship of the margins, an original writing of the shadows of prehistory and childhood. Since the signs of hobos and those who evangelized the carcass of the silver subway of New York since 1970, graffiti is a kinetic writing, it borrows the perspectives of the rails that lacerate the wise landscapes… Bringing together some forty international artists, In the name of the name rallies and connects visions of disorder to deploy an imagery of trouble. Documentary photography, atmosphere, action, intimate archive, burnt, forgotten memory, pictorial photography, police photography: the exhibition stretches a negative thought of graffiti considered as revealing what the city stirs up.

5- Wagon-Bar, A short history of the railway meal
Cruise – July 1 to September 29 – 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

The photographs and archives presented in this exhibition come from the funds of the former CIWL and the Archives Documentation Service of the SNCF group (SARDO). Halfway between industrial photography and advertising photography, these images first have the function of embodying modernity by staging permanent novelty. They thus draw not only a history of work and innovation, but also an aesthetic history – with the evolution of design – and a cultural one. Moreover, these photographs document their time. They are not simple markers of successive mutations: they make the different eras as much as they bear witness to them.

6- Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coen
La Tour, Parc des Ateliers – July 1 to September 29 – From 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

LUMA Arles presents Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coenan exhibition born from the collaboration between the American photographer and the famous filmmaker. Through 70 prints and a film, the exhibition reviews Lee Friedlander’s 60-year career. Joel Coen’s selection synthesizes his singular approach to composition and reveals an unexpected affinity between these two artists: both explore with fascination the insidious power of images – fragmented frame, deceptive composition, dislocated shot, mirror effect. A true cinematic mise en abyme, the exhibition unfolds the prints like individual, strange and anonymous mini-stories.

7- Nhu Xuan Hua et Vimala Pons – Heaven and Hell
Saint-Blaise Church – July 1 to September 29 – 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Nhu Xuan Hua and Vimala Pons, through their photographic, performative and introspective gestures, have brought to the forefront the link between body-action / woman-body, the idea of ​​proposing oneself as a subject and not as an object. The two artists propose a hybrid exhibition where the lived experience has come to take over the places as if to find a new refuge to continue their construction. Several levels of simultaneous narrations invite a poetic vertigo in perpetual movement: whether it is outside or inside oneself, the imbalance represents the contamination of the image by reality.

8- Exhibition of the Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Prize: Be on the look-out
Espace Monoprix – July 1 to September 29 – From 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

In 2024, a new chapter is being written for the Prix Découverte, which is taking over the Espace Monoprix and reinventing its exhibition route by drawing on the graphic characteristics and the curved façade of the venue. Be on the look-out comes from a feeling of diffuse but largely palpable disquiet among the seven artists presented: François Bellabas, Cemil Batur Gökçeer, Coline Jourdan, Tshepiso Mazibuko, Matan Mittwoch, Marilou Poncin and Nanténé Traoré. It evokes an acuity to the world, a physical and psychological state where the artist remains alert to address the troubles of the time without giving in to frontality. Faced with the disasters that are looming or already eating away, alternative scenarios keep the catastrophe at a distance and draw alternative paths.

9- Ishiuchi Miyako – Belongings
2024 Women in Motion Award Winner
Henri-Comte Room – July 1 to September 29 – 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

“Everything that has a form eventually disappears. Once the human body is lifeless, it can no longer continue to exist in this world. This is obvious, but sometimes I find it impossible to accept. This was the case with my mother’s death, even though it is normal for a parent to die before their child. Her body was no longer there. The possessions she left behind, which were once attached to her, had become useless without their owner. Before getting rid of them, I decided to take photographs.”

Aiming Right: Pétanque and Provençal Game Through the Lens of Hans Silvester
Museon Arlaten Chapel – Museum of Provence – July 1 to September 29 – 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. – Tuesday to Sunday

The exhibition Aiming Right: Pétanque and Provençal Game Through the Lens of Hans Silvester presents a youthful work on the games of boules in Provence in the 1970s. We can already detect, in this Provençal investigation, his method based on the patiently created link with his subject. In settings highlighted by a perfectly mastered black and white, Hans Silvester reveals the performance of the players, captures the omnipresent Provençal dramaturgy. Without forgetting the public, the “gallery”, which forms a body around the players. He invites us to observe with him these men, women and children, focused on the moment, serious in the game, a fragment of Provence as he has lived it, imagined it and described it for more than sixty years.

The Artistik Rezo team wishes you wonderful visits and wonderful photographic discoveries!