No less than five French institutions, dedicated or not to photography, are each presenting a new exhibition at the Rencontres d’Arles this year. It’s a good excuse to take you on a guided tour of the Ateliers SNCF and the Abbaye de Montmajour while passing by the city center.
Let us start the tour with the Abbaye de Montmajour where Kate Barry, The Habit of Being, co-produced by the Bal and curated by Diane Dufour and Fannie Escoulen, is the Bal’s first off-the-walls exhibition. The presentation lifts the veil from a never-before-seen work of the photographer, who passed away in 2013. Though we know her portraits of stars and fashion photos, this exhibition is an opportunity to explore her personal work, mostly landscapes. It gathers prints made under her control, cut-up contact sheets, and texts as well as excerpts from films made during a trip to Savannah in 2007 with Jean Rolin in the footsteps of Flannery O’Connor, an American writer whom she admired.
A change of place and direction to the Ateliers SNCF with two exhibitions at the Atelier de la Mécanique. The first, co-produced by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and curated by Raphaële Bertho and Héloïse Conésa, is gathering fifteen photographers who have participated in the Photography Mission of the Land Development and Regional Action Delegation (known by its French acronym DATAR), a commissioned project started in 1983. Its goal: to represent the French landscape of the 1980s. Originally planned to last just one year, this project would last until 1989 with a total of twenty-nine participating photographers, young or established artists, French or foreign. The exhibition creates a dialogue between seen and never-before-seen images and personal archives.
The second exhibition, offered by the Jeu de Paume, allows you to discover Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz, who began working in the 1970s under the dictatorship of Pinochet. It is a work which is part of the social documentary genre, breaking many taboos of this somber period in Chilean history. Chronological and thematic, the exhibition gathers around 150 prints ranging from the 1970s to today.
Finally, at the Atelier des Forges, the Centre Pompidou is celebrating its 40th anniversary with the exhibition The Spector of Surrealism. It gathers works from its collection on the theme. Historical figures like Brassaï, Hans Bellmer, or Marcel Duchamp alongside contemporary artists like Cindy Sherman, Taryn Simon, Sophie Ristelhueber… Fifty artists in total who were the initiators of or inspired by surrealism (exhibition curator: Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska).
Returning to town, the Cloister Saint-Trophime is presenting the latest BMW Residency at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, under the commission of François Cheval. Dune Varela dipped into the museums archives to develop a serie of works around landscape and its representation.
Sophie Bernard
Festival des Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles 2017
From July 3 through September 24, 2017
Arles, France
