Les Rencontres de la photographie: Summer of Fireflies, Arles and environs

The festival director Christoph Wiesner references Georges Didi-Huberman’s thoughts about fireflies when responding to the “urgency of the present” for the 52nd edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles, which is the first under his directorship. The introductory text by the former artistic director of Paris Photo questions photography’s current political potential: “Arles in midsummer will 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.” For the realization of this metaphorical picture, he mobilized the terms “Identities/Fluidities,” “Emergences,” “Atlas,” and “Rereading” and allocated at the festival’s core thirty-five exhibitions in the city of Arles and then beyond in the program Grand Arles Express.

Of course, formats and places have partly changed since the festival’s last editions: Frank Gehry’s aluminum landmark building for the LUMA Foundation opened just two weeks before Les Rencontres. It is now overlooking the historical cityscape and might be ready to take up the Bilbao effect, which has inspired the revamping of various postindustrial cities since the 1990s. Naturally, gentrification processes are transforming the city, and maybe this is behind why the Voies-Off Festival did not return. Large exhibitions populated more or less historic sites downtown, and also a Monoprix supermarket near the train station, the venue Croisière, but also public gardens. One of the highlights of the festival was the exhibition of the reorganized Louis Roederer Discovery Award.

The appointed curator Sonia Voss brought together eleven so-called emerging artists, selected from an open call but proposed by a photographic institution or gallery. She put questions that concern the medium of photography literally at the beginning and the center of the exhibition in the Gothic church Les Frères Prêcheurs. Mariana Hahn explores the transformative relationship between the elements of copper and salt that shaped the early days of photography. Andrzej Steinbach investigates photography through its apparatus, questioning modes of representation and identity. Tarrah Krajnak poses naked with concrete blocks, referencing modernity and the canonic female nudes shot by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Ilanit Illouz investigates the Judean desert and uses salt from the Dead Sea, lending a sculptural element to her photographs. Jonas Kamm employs computer software simulating photographic means to create enigmatic and fragile humanoid forms. Each project is installed on a carpentered wooden structure, thus enabling surprising sight lines and a maximum presence for single works. Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili takes ornamental structures from Byzantine churches that have been appropriated for touristic plastic bags and shows them on a monumentally installed transparent fabric. This broad range of practices gives a very timely overview of current photographic affairs, while others follow the festival’s main concern of delving into topics related to identity. A rather autobiographical approach is pursued by Aykan Safoğlu, who focuses on questions of his life between the countries Germany and Turkey, or Marie Tomanova, who shares her personal story of homecoming for Christmas to a Czech village after a decade in New York. Massao Mascaro follows Ulysses’s itinerary in the Mediterranean to explore the perpetual motion of personal stories and their relation to a larger history. Farah Al Qasimi and Zora J Murff investigate different social realities. The former shows the everyday world of women through interior spaces typical of the urban upper-middle class in her country of origin, the United Arab Emirates, whereas the latter analyzes various layers of (systemic) racial violence in the African-American neighborhood of North Omaha, Nebraska. With a completely different take, three major group exhibitions are summarized under the festival’s main subject Identities/Fluidities.

The New Black Vanguard, curated by Antwaun Sargent (produced and shown in 2019 by Aperture, New York, and touring worldwide), takes early issues of influential Black culture magazines such as Jet and Ebony as the point of departure for investigating the Black body in fashion photography, by focusing on its commercial side but also questioning its social or maybe even subversive potential. These early magazines are counterposed with rather recent features or a cover of Life magazine picturing Amanda Gorman and VOGUE showing Kamala Harris photographed by Tyler Mitchell. With the images mounted on movable yellow walls, visitors encounter highly stylized photographs partly fathoming fashion photography (many of the exhibited artists are affiliated with major magazines such as i-D, VOGUE, or The New York Times but also do advertising) as a socially engaged tool. Daniel Obasi, for instance, understands his work as a form of activism by working with disempowered Nigerian communities and challenging gender representation, while Nadine Ijewere sets out to disrupt the fashion industry’s traditional notion of beauty by predominantly working with women of color, and Quil Lemons challenges hypermasculinity by using glitter against a pink backdrop in (Black) masculine communities.

Forms of male representation are also reflected in Masculinities, with the subtitle Liberation through Photography, taken up at LUMA’s Parc des Ateliers (Alona Pardo curated this traveling show starting at the Barbican, London, in 2020). Clarisse Hahn’s series Princes of the Streets (2021), investigating male rituals in a working-class neighborhood in the Parisian suburbs, and Sébastien Lifshitz’s film installation Sensitive Boys (2021), which traces the first coded mentions of homosexuality in French public TV, lead up to the major exhibition: “Touching on queer identity, racial politics, power, and patriarchy, the perception of men by women, heteronormative stereotypes, hegemonic masculinity, and the family, the works in the exhibition present masculinity as an unfixed performative identity shaped by cultural and social forces” (press text). The high density of canonical works questioning dominant modes of masculine identity covers a wide range: Bas Jan Ader, Sam Contis, Peter Hujar, Liz Johnson Artur, Catherine Opie, Elle Pérez, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Clare Strand, Wolfgang Tillmans, Marianne Wex, and David Wojnarowicz. Orit Gat reviewed the Barbican exhibition for Camera Austria International no. 150/151 (2020), critically analyzing its chapters and raising awareness for the show’s sequencing and choreography: “The context in which works are displayed changes their reading.” She proposed alternative neighborhoods to open up a more performative reading of the exhibition title. Yet, here one has to further ask if the heart of one of the world’s most prominent photography festivals is the right place for just a further stop of successfully touring exhibitions.

However, the third group exhibition demands that we Rethink Everything and questions The Power of Art in Times of Isolation (curated in collaboration by Andrea Giunta, first shown at ROLF ART, Buenos Aires, in 2020). Hence, it responds closely to the festival’s curatorial statement focusing on the conditions of now, aggravated by the wake of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2020, and the coronavirus pandemic. It introduces Latin America’s wide range of feminist practices from the 1960s until today, with the curatorial aim of revisiting works made under different circumstances and unfolding potential new meanings in the now. The pandemic has shed light on the domestic sphere, bringing its power relations to the fore and unfolding ongoing feminist struggles for a different world. Within the very broad concept of the festival, these three group exhibitions clearly unfold a “polyphony of stories” in the light of diversity and probe the political agency of photography with powerful curatorial claims. When following the paths of the festival’s single projects one could find strong contributions.

Part of the chapter Rereading was the noteworthy exhibition Charlotte Perriand: How Do We Want to Live? shown at Monoprix, unfolding her Politics of Photomontage with a focus on the 1930s in Paris. The curators (Damarice Amao with Sébastien Gokalp and the Charlotte Perriand Archives) showed the various ways that Perriand used photography to document living conditions and to promote her vision of a better world. In 1928, she joined the Le Cobusier studio and later went to the USSR twice; she was a member of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and on the political left. On frescoes (such as for the French Ministry of Agriculture’s waiting room, 1936) and in collages, she drew on the visual vocabulary of Soviet propaganda, its collaborative spirit, its graphic and visual innovations. Monumental in size, these frescoes presented themselves as immersive didactic tools for communication and education, primarily targeting the working class. For the politically revolutionary nature of her work, Perriand used in-depth research showing precise socioeconomic data, combining typography and recurring visual motifs, which the exhibition powerfully laid out.

The festival Les Rencontres extends toward adjacent cities in the south of France with significant solo presentations, such as at Carré d’Art in Nîmes. Jean-Marc Prévost curated the first institutional solo exhibition of Jeff Weber, The Serial Grey. It shows the performative potential of Weber’s artistic practice translated into three similar rooms with a size of 6 to 9 meters: different bodies of work entangle the Western linear understanding of time with its circular understanding from antiquity. Starting with rasterized black-and-white photograms, derived from complex digital processes (Untitled [Neural Networks], 2020), Weber shows three chapters of An Attempt at a Personal Epistemology (2012– 20) with Alexi Kukuljevic, Snejanka Mihaylova, and Robert Beavers, building up toward his film projects in the adjoining black box where the neural networks are animated on 16mm.

In Marseille, the FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur shows the work of the Franco-Algerian artist and filmmaker Katia Kameli. Her film trilogy Le Roman Algérien (The Algerian Novel, 2016, 2017, 2019) reveals how different image collections trigger memories, starting in the eighteenth century but particularly addressing Algeria’s Black Decade in the 1990s, and closes with the protests of the Hirak movement. On the building’s upper level, Kameli expands her artistic research on storytelling with La Fontaine’s Fables beyond film into a multimedia installation using sculpture, prints, sound, and collage. Streams of Stories (2014–ongoing) traces the fables’ journey from India to France, questioning the political implications of the translations underlining the exhibition’s title She Lit the Fire of the Past.