Since their creation, the Rencontres d’Arles have defended photography and all of its actors: photographers, artists, curators, publishers … It is in this desire that the Rencontres d’Arles associate the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at all the exhibition venues. Indeed, through their work as pioneers, galleries, art centers, associative spaces, independent places and institutions are often the first to support emerging artists. The eleven selected projects will be exhibited at the next edition of the Rencontres d´Arles. During the opening week, a jury will award the Louis Roederer Discovery Award, which rewards an artist and the structure carrying the project through an acquisition in the amount of 15,000 euros and the public will award the Public Prize through a acquisition in the amount of 5,000 euros.
The Louis Roederer Discovery Award is evolving and playing with openness by including, in addition to galleries, all exhibition venues in its selection process. This year, the 11 selected projects are considered as one and the same exhibition, thought out, from selection to hanging, by the curator, Sonia Voss. It is in an emblematic place of the festival, the Church of the Frères-Prêcheurs, that she and the set designer Amanda Antunes will highlight the emerging scene, in an innovative and eco-responsible way.
THE ELEVEN SELECTED PROJECTS – Part 2
TARRAH KRAJNAK
AS-IS.LA GALLERY, LOS ANGELES, UNITED STATES
Born in 1979 in Lima, Peru. Lives and works in Los Angeles, United States.
THE MASTERS AND THEIR RITUALS II: THE NUDE OF WESTON
Tarrah Krajnak’s work relates closely to the history of photography on the one hand and to feminine and Latin American identity on the other. In line with her first critical tribute to Ansel Adams, she offers here a second part, dedicated to another North American “master”, Edward Weston, whose famous Nudes she reconstructs. She takes the place of models Bertha Wardell and Charis Wilson. While reproducing the poses of the latter, she stages herself as the author of the photographs, remote trigger in hand. Restoring to the image what Weston left out of focus – or highlighting Weston’s choices of framing – exclusion – Krajnak re-enacts a significant chapter in the history of photography by refocusing it on the role of the female model . Through her performative and photographic act, Krajnak affirms her Latin American identity and her body of color and through her presence and her image reconstruction establishes a dialogue with her predecessor, Weston, as well as with the contemporary viewer.
MASSAO MASCARO
FOUNDATION IN STICHTING, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
Born in 1990 in Lille, France. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
SUB SOLE
Sub Sole (from Latin: under the sun) is a photographic work carried out from 2017 to 2020 around the Mediterranean Sea following the mythological itinerary of Odysseus travels: Ceuta, Naples, Athens, Palermo, Istanbul, Tunis and Lampedusa. Crossroads of cultures, cradle of founding myths, the Mediterranean region is, today more than ever, marked by migration, exile and displacement. Over the course of seven trips and numerous chance encounters, Mascaro seeked and met the young people who live in this region. The literary stories that nourished the artist are the invisible companions of the photographs. They imbue contemporary images with their ancient sources.
Political, economic, existential, poetic issues intersect under the sun; under the harsh and warm light of the Mediterranean which imprints its rhythm on human lives.
ZORA J MURFF
WEBBER GALLERY, LONDON, GREAT BRITAIN
/ NEW YORK, UNITED STATES
Born in 1987 in Des Moines, United States.
Lives and works in Fayetteville, United States.
AT NO INTERMEDIATE POINT
At no point in between takes for subject the black neighborhood of North Omaha, in Nebraska; combining portraits of its inhabitants and urban landscapes, the series evokes a social environment deeply determined by successive racist policies and the injustice that has reigned there for a long time. Combining human and topographical investigation on the one hand, archive analysis work on the other, Murff emphasizes the complex web of violence that targets the city’s black community: that of the most heinous crimes, such as the lynching of Will Brown (1919), the assassination of Vivian Strong (1969) or the recent police violence whose videos have been widely circulated on social networks; but also that, systemic, of government decisions with devastating effects, leading to social and economic exclusion, such as the programmed ghettoization of the neighborhood of urban planning policies.
The bodies and the places they inhabit both bear the scars of the racism which, even today, is a dominant part of the black condition in the United States.
AYKAN SAFOĞLU
THE PILL, ISTANBUL, TURKEY
Born 1984 in Istanbul, Turkey.
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and Vienna, Austria.
RETROGRADE SIRIUS
It all begins with the fall of a tree one night under the artist’s window. From this event and the triggered memory of summer vacations spent with his parents on the island of Imbros, the artist tells the story of his own experience of being uprooted. Turkish, educated at the German high school of Istanbul, he went into exile in Berlin during his studies, following in the footsteps of his aunts and uncle. Studying at the German high school, was supposed to lead to a better life, but brings to light the being torn between two cultures, two countries. The intimate story, that of a family and his personal reconciliation, use personal photographic archives, Safoğlu’s favorite material, whose work is based on the handling of existing images, the palimpsest, the connection with orality. Here the photographs seem to have been crushed. Their reconstituted frame, parade as on a conveyor belt evoking a road, punctuated by the artist’s footsteps which accompany the narrative movement.
ANDRZEJ STEINBACH
BERLINISCHE GALERIE – BERLIN’S MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARCHITECTURE, BERLIN,
GERMANY
Born in 1983 in Czarnków, Poland. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
THE DEVICE
Third part of a series of portraits focusing on questions the representation and our perception of the photographic model, The device depicts the figure of a photographer in action. The model’s sexual neutrality assimilates it to the photographic apparatus, of which it is like a continuity: the title apparatus is as much the mechanical object as the body which makes it work and sets it in motion. The gaze and the body are interconnected. Reproducing a casting or scientific observation situation, Steinbach has the model simulate various photographic and gestural strategies and attitudes, creates variation using a reduced set of accessories, while systematically leaving the action or object at which the camera is directed out of focus. Is this a scene of war, a demonstration? If the photos refer to very coded uses of photography and, hollow, in specific genres, they also recall the process at work in their making, generally erased by the image itself.
MARIE TOMANOVA
PRAGOVKA GALLERY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
Born 1984 in Valtice, Czech Republic. Lives and works in New York, United States.
IT WAS OLD MY UNIVERSE
This Was Once My World is the autobiographical tale of a return to my homeland after a decade of absence. Returning from New York to Mikulov, a Czech village in South Moravia, and to the family farm, Tomanova documents her reunion with her relatives. Yet the eerie strangeness dominates. The lamented, remembered, fantasized house – an imaginary refuge in the difficult moments of exile – has become an unusual, dislocated setting, in which she no longer finds her place. The feelings of disorientation and loss of identity, closely linked to uprooting, are experienced in an even more conflictual way when they mark, as here, the long-awaited return “home”. The series extends the exploration of the genre of the self-portrait dear to the artist. The date stamp of the camera refers to time, that of the shot which, in its precision, is opposed to the confused time of memory. Like the hero of Brigadoon, the artist is locked in an anachronism, a subtle and powerful gap between nostalgia and lived experience.
With the support of the Czech Center in Paris.
ÉGLISE DES FRÈRES PRÊCHEURS
4 JULY – 29 AUGUST 2021
10.00 AM – 07.30 PM
