The 2021 edition of Les Rencontres de la photographie in Arles - titled "Summer of Fireflies” - has opened its doors last 4th July. After months of COVID-19 turmoil during which culture was facing an uncertain future, Les Rencontres de la photographie hopes to “be like a constellation of fireflies, made up of a thousand lights illuminating the diversity of regards, polyphony of stories, and symbolizing the survival of hope and consciousness-raising by means of the image,” explains Christoph Wiesner, who succeeds Sam Stourdzé as Director of the Rencontres d’Arles. “Far from imagining a tabula rasa tempting us to break away from the suspended time induced by the pandemic, it becomes about reflecting on how to update a heritage.”
The Rencontres d’Arles not only comes up with a new director, but also with a new graphic identity. After flipping the photograph around to give the Rencontres a decidedly modern identity and image, ABM Studio is following up on its radical, context-specific rethinking of communications and the festival’s brand. So, the A is for Arles—and the first letter of a story yet to come.
After visiting the exhibitions, here are our picks of the six must-see shows in Arles this season.
WINNER OF THE JIMEI x ARLES DISCOVERY AWARDVENUE: ABBAYE DE MONTMAJOUR
Sim Chi Yin’s project contests historiographies of the so-called Malayan Emergency (1948-1960), where jungles, plantations and villages became battlegrounds for anti-colonial fighters, and British and Commonwealth troops. For Interventions, shown for the first time, Sim combed the British Imperial War Museum’s archive, photographing prints and negatives to merge verso and recto into one plane. Sim introduces further perspectives of the anti-colonial left with two other series: Remnants features landscapes from the conflict in present-day Malaysia and Thailand that still retain traces of war. Requiem is a video installation where former deportees and exiles living across China, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia reclaim memories of their political participation in their own voice, performing revolutionary songs. Sim’s assemblage of suppressed histories, personal narratives, private collections and altered sites form a counter-archive to colonial and postcolonial states’ account of the war.
WINNERS OF THE LUMA RENCONTRES DUMMY BOOK AWARD 2019VENUE: LE JARDIN DES VOYAGEURS
Although last year’s festival could not be held, to pay tribute to the artists, the festival and its partners joined forces to ensure that the prizes for 2020 be awarded. This is the case of Chow and Lin’s “The Poverty Line” project, which won the 2019 Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award.
The Poverty Line uses the universal lens of food to examine the daily choices we would face living at the poverty line. Over the last ten years, artists travelled 200,000 kilometers to create case studies of 36 countries and territories spanning six continents. Each photograph beckons scrutiny while inviting the observer to try to make sense of the whole. Individual portraits of food items bathed in dramatic light imbue a few bananas, scattered rice grains or a leg of chicken with existential meaning. The Poverty Line is a growing conversation that investigates our understanding of poverty and inequality. Covering various cultures and economic systems, it confronts the viewer with objective, non-emotional observations of our own circumstances framed against the fragile balance of social structures, growth and divide in an entangled globalized world.
Unfortunately Chow and Lin weren’t able to come, but we had the chance to have a very special visit on the phone with them.
VENUE: LE JARDIN D'ÉTÉ
North Korea has always been an enigma to me. Why has it never wobbled while other authoritarian regimes collapsed in the upheavals brought about by the fall of the Berlin Wall, modernity and social media? It has outlasted the communist bloc that guaranteed its political and economic stability; withstood international embargos aiming to strangle it; overcame successive economic, climate or food crises; and never experienced a massive uprising despite constant surveillance and repression. North Korean officials were baffled by my proposal to do individual portraits. My "revolutionary" approach ran against the grain of their collectivist culture. Why did they agree? A desire for openness, no doubt, but also, I think, because the idea of frontal poses, and rigorous framing, was familiar and understandable to them. Deliberately flirting with the conventions of the propaganda image, this device made me static, predictable and controllable.
VENUE: MONOPRIX
Charlotte Perriand devoted her life to improving the living conditions of as many people as possible, creating an "art of inhabiting" in connection with nature. She used photography not only as a tool for observing reality, but also to promote her conception of a new world. Echoing our current concerns, in the 1930s she used sweeping photomontages to denounce unhealthy urban conditions and present her vision of how life can be made better. Her striking photographic frescoes, including "The Great Misery of Paris" (1936) and the Agriculture Ministry’s waiting room and pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne [International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life] (both 1937), created with Fernand Léger, attest to her modernity. The exhibition offers insights into her idea of the world through her working methods and incredible collection of photographs—period prints, negatives, magazine clippings and personal photographs—on display for the first time, set against recreations of her monumental photomontages.
AS PART OF THE LOUIS ROEDERER DISCOVERY AWARDVENUE: ÉGLISE DES FRÈRES PRÊCHEURS
In the Église Frères Prêcheurs at the center of Arles, Emergences takes up residence this year with the Louis Roederer Discovery Award in a new format. “Each year now,” explains Christoph Wiesner “a new curator will express their vision of trends in young contemporary art. The year 2021 was entrusted to Sonia Voss, who uses a new design concept that puts the projects into dialogue with one other.” She and scenographer Amanda Antunes innovatively and ecologically showcase 11 shortlisted projects. Two particularly caught our attention.
Jonas Kamm’s series The Inhabitants is the result of a hybrid production process, at the cross-roads of architecture, sculpture and photography. These images – two-dimensional renderings drawn from 3D virtual space—initially take shape in a space modeled by the artist with the aid of computer software. Kamm then, using virtual tools, sculpts figures based on a texture that he has previously “harvested” with the camera from his physical environment. Once the figures have been shaped, the software—simulating the tools of photography—permits the artist to choose an angle and to adjust, from a practically unlimited spectrum of possibilities, his light sources, his focus, his aperture, etc. Kamm’s figures, vaguely anthropomorphic, appear as intermediaries between the real and immaterial worlds. The reductive character, the unclassifiable nature of these images turns them into vectors of inchoate narratives, carriers of a potential meaning which has yet to be defined and which remains mysterious, opening a void that we are invited to fill.
Ilanit Illouz’s Wadi Qelt, in the Stony Light is based on extensive research into the natural elements and proposes an experimental photographic study of Wadi Qelt, a valley situated in the Judaean Desert between Jerusalem and Jericho, near the Dead Sea. The dramatic desiccation of the lake has transformed the region into a lunar zone, corroded by salt. The artist collects this salt from the desert floor and then, in her studio, uses it to fossilize her prints, lending them a sculptural quality. Both image and structural component at once, the salt solidifies the work and makes it scintillate, revealing the organic properties of the mineral, but also its hieratic beauty, evoking a landscape for contemplation but also a threatened ecosystem.
More information:The Rencontres d'Arles 2021 - Summer of FirefliesUntil September 26, 2021Arles, Francewww.rencontres-arles.com