Since its creation, the Rencontres d'Arles has promoted photography and all its stakeholders, from photographers to artists, curators and publishers. With this in mind, the Rencontres d’Arles associates the Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation with all exhibition spaces: through their trailblazing work, galleries, art centers, non-profits, independent venues and institutions are often the first to support emerging artists. During opening week, a jury will bestow the Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation, which comes with an acquisition worth €15,000, upon an artist and the project’s supporting organization, and the public will vote for the Public Award, which carries with it an acquisition worth €5,000.

ON THE LOOK-OUT

The exhibition starts from a diffuse yet tangible sense of disquiet among the seven artists featured in this fourth edition of the Discovery Award. It suggests an acuity to the world, a physical and psychic state in which the artist is on the alert to broach the troubles of the times without yielding to frontality. Facing up to the disasters that lie in wait or are already gnawing away, alternative scenarios keep catastrophe at a distance and chart byways.

Perhaps more than its many imperfect synonyms (malaise, anguish, anxiety...),the term disquiet, echoing the English translation of the book by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa*, augurs this heightened, vibratory state of awareness.

Nanténé Traoré’s series sets the tone, conveying a sense of floating, as if everything were ready to falter. The tension is latent but palpable. In her portraits, Tshepiso Mazibuko scrutinizes her generation, that of the born free, and those that followed in post-Apartheid South Africa, with cracks and snags abounding. Coline Jourdan's work addresses the issue of invisible pollution. Her photographic approach seeks to detect subtle clues in the landscape, rather than adopting an alarmist response to the larger scale terrain. When François Bellabas photographs California in the grip of fire and tension escalates, it’s to provide a dystopian re-reading in which AI has progressively prevailed. Flash Back: for Cemil Batur Gökçeer, the catastrophe has already taken place when he creates his sensitive archive of disasters (floodings, forest fires, earthquakes). His film is multiply exposed, resulting in photographs that, like omens, conjure up an image of doubt. Fast Forward: in her installation, Marilou Poncin draws on speculative design to anticipate a near-future in which humans can forge an affective, sensory relationship with technological objects. More reflexively, in Matan Mittwoch's photographic installation, a muted violence resurfaces when an obstructive gesture reveals an incandescent breach, or when an abrasive surface conveys the illusion of a stellar landscape. The works presented here often skew chronological time, keeping us on the look-out.

Audrey Illouz

* Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Pantheon Books, 1991.


Les projets d’artistes sélectionnés pour le Prix Découverte 2023 Fondation Louis Roederer sont :

→ FRANÇOIS BELLABAS (France) 
presented by the CENTRE PHOTOGRAPHIQUE D'ÎLE-DE-FRANCE (France)

→ CEMIL BATUR GÖKÇEER (Turkey)
presented by KA (Turkey)

→ COLINE JOURDAN (France)
presented by LE LIEU DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE (France)

→ TSHEPISO MAZIBUKO (South Africa)
presented by UMHLABATHI COLLECTIVE (South Africa)

→ MATAN MITTWOCH (Israel)
presented by PAR GALERIE DVIR (Belgium / France / Israel)

→ MARILOU PONCIN (France)
presented by GALERIE LAURENT GODIN (France) 

→ NANTÉNÉ TRAORÉ (France)
presented by GALERIE SULTANA (France)