Amidst the breeze of the Mistral and the light that enchanted Van Gogh, Les Rencontres also offers fascinating locations even if less monumental than abbeys and cloisters. So, a charming corner like the Maison des Peintres showcases the photographs by Rajesh Vora and those by Randa Mirza.
Imaginative images, those by Vora in the exhibition Everyday Baroque (2014-2019), but reflecting an actual reality, an interesting sociological study. Elegic and denunciatory photographs are those by Randa Mirza in Beirutopia.
Centrally located, just outside the city walls, the Maison des Peintres with a sense of simple architecture and lush greenery, introduces us to the work of Indian photographer Rajesh Vora, his career spanning thirty years and a keen interest in the environment and disappearing habitats. Many collaborations with architects and environmentalists and a critical view of the social, cultural and political situation in India
In Everyday Baroque (shown in 2016 at Photoink, New Delhi, and then in Canada), Vora is documenting the ‘sculptural objects’ that adorn roofs in the Punjab region of India.
The phenomenon is not only surprising and curious but also quite interesting from a cultural and social point of view. In fact, it refers to the first wave of immigrants, the NRIs (non-resident Indians), who began building houses in their villages in the late 1970s. Villages where houses often open for one month a year, for the annual holiday spent in one’s own village. And such villages, with their creative roofs, are a kind of ode to their achievement, to their hard-won prosperity. The houses themselves are a mix of various styles, genres and historical periods. The sculptures on them are icons and symbols of personal and family pride. They are domestic sculptures, telling a story of emigrating and returning home.
A touch of humour links the entire exhibition, which Vora has constructed by traversing four districts of Punjab, with these icons of wealth that seem to chase and overlap: superheroes, planes, lions and horses, tanks, footballers, tractors. A “catalogue of the world” in which the icons may be repeated as subjects, but unravel in infinite declinations.
The same exhibition context for Randa Mirza’s Beirutopia. Winner of the 2023 Photo Folio Review, she is a Lebanese visual artist who uses different media and visual and performance languages in her artistic journey to bring to light, to reveal what seems forgotten or even hidden. As a space for reflection, reparation, and resistance in the face of violence, her work is situated somewhere between documentary, personal expression, and artistic writing.
Aware of the war and the destruction it caused, she produced Beirutopia, a kind of visual essay that tells, from her biographical point of view, the crisis (social, political, financial) that Lebanon is going through, on the verge of war and the hope for peace, with a critical view of the transformation of post-war Beirut. She is doing it thanks to seven works produced over more than two decades.
For instance, Randa Mirza says, “The rooms in the Abandoned Rooms series (2005) become those of
my own memory, real or imagined. In Beirutopia (2010-2019), utopia and reality fuse into a single image. This series, which gives its name to the exhibition, denounces post-war reconstruction policies and the erasure of urban identity”. And the View from Home (2020) series (created by the duo Jeanne et Moreau, with Lara Tabet), is inspired by stereoscopic views. Spatial distance is replaced by a rupture in time, before and after the explosion on August 4, 2020.
Rajesh Vora. Everyday Baroque (2014-2019)
July 1 to September 29, 2024
Maison des Peintres
45, boulevard Émile-Combes
13200 Arles
France
https://www.rencontres-arles.com/en/expositions/view/1529/rajesh-vora
