The Centre Pompidou in Paris celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2017 everywhere in France. To share its anniversary with a wider audience, the institution will be presenting a completely new program of exhibitions, exceptional loans and various events throughout the year. Surrealism is still alive, even if it sometimes leads its life underground this is a conclusion we can come to by looking at contemporary photography, or more broadly, photography after 1945. Using the photographic collections at the Centre Pompidou, this exhibition in Arles returns to a few of the themes born of the interaction between surrealism and photography. It shows the ways in which the artists of the postwar years drew on the surrealist sensibility, and illustrates how they adapted their relationship to reality to their ends, abolishing the rules of art, taking the absurd to extremes and addressing contemporary political issues. Beyond chronological continuity, the exhibition places seemingly disparate artistic projects in dialogue with one another across their similar strategies.
Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska
Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska is a curator at the Cabinet of Photography of MNAM Center Pompidou.
The specter of surrealism
Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles 2017
July 3 to September 24, 2017
Arles, France
