A disquieting feeling pervades Arles’ Discovery Award

MSLS_000354, 2019. From An Electronic Legacy © François Bellabas. Courtesy of the artist / ADAPG, Paris

Audrey Illouz’s subtle selection for the Arles Discovery Award Louis Roederer Fondation highlights a prevalent unease among the artists this year

I arrive in Arles early on 01 July, as counts from the first round of the snap election are coming in; it’s clear the Rassemblement National have won a historic share, and now begins a tense period before 07 July, when another vote decides whether the Far Right leads the government. It’s a strange time to be in France and, though politicians are busy jockeying for position, there’s also a sense of holding one’s breath. It’s an appropriate moment to visit the Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award at Rencontres d’Arles, because this year it’s themed ‘on the lookout’. 

As in previous years, galleries and (since 2021) community and artist-run initiatives have suggested artists, and the festival team plus a curator have picked out a handful; this year the curator is Audrey Illouz, and she’s highlighted ‘disquiet’ as a watchword for her selection. A term popularised in France by Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, it describes a “heightened, vibratory sense of consciousness, perhaps more so than its many imperfect synonyms (malaise, anguish, anxiety),” she writes in the introductory text, adding that the show explores “a diffuse but palpable sense of unease shared by the seven artists”. “Faced with impending of ongoing disasters”, these artists are “attentive to the trouble of our time without indulging in frontality”, she adds. 

It’s a theme that suggested itself, Illouz tells me during a walk-through of the exhibition. She could have chosen community, the environment, or “546 different shows”, but of the 300 or so series put forward, it was this sense of uneasy alert that came through. “It was very present,” she remarks. “This feeling of disquiet or of encompassing the darkness was very of the moment, so to do anything else felt too orientated, and unrepresentative of the artists.”

This year the Discovery Award is in a new venue, the Espace Monoprix. Literally a room above the supermarket, it’s smaller and considerably less grand than the previous space, the beautiful Eglise des Freres Precheurs. It could be interpreted negatively, but Illouz is happy with the move. People had become very accustomed to seeing the Discovery Award in the church, to the extent that some of the photographers’ applications had specifically detailed installations for it, she says. It’s better for everyone, including the locals, to seek out new connections and resonances.

The Espace Monoprix also has certain advantages which were useful for this year’s selection. A 1960s building, it’s interesting but quieter than the church, both metaphorically and literally, and therefore well-suited to her subtle theme. The low ceilings also make it easier to include sound, so one artist, Marilou Poncin, is showing video only – the first time this has happened in the Discovery Award. The low ceilings and shape of the room also make it easier to make a route through the works, allowing Illouz to curate a tight journey.

And that’s helpful because, other than an amorphous sense of alert, the seven artists are working with disparate media. “There are very different approaches, artists dealing with more documentary, with film with more experimental forms, with installation, with video,” Illouz points out. “I thought it was very important to respect all these different languages, though at the same time be quite acute with this notion of disquiet.”

 “There are very different approaches, artists dealing with more documentary, with film with more experimental forms, with installation, with video”

The exhibition starts with a work by Nanténé Traoré called L’Inquietude, referencing a play by Valere Novarina. The images are striking but gentle, some printed on opaque glass, one on literally soft, rippling fabric. “Traoré’s images convey a sense of suspension” reads Illouz’s text and that’s true, though a few shots suggest a hospital and, once the idea of a hospital has registered, an appealingly colourful image of flowers takes on a new hue. “There is this indeterminacy” to the images, muses Illouz, pointing out that, in previous works, Traoré has explored trans issues. “This is a new way, it’s no longer clearly identity and gender. It’s floating, nothing is really tangible.”

From there the exhibition moves to another documentary series by South African Tshepiso Mazibuko. It’s titled Ho tshepa ntshepedi ya bontshepe [To Believe in Something That Will Never Happen], after a Sethoso proverb; born in 1995, Mazibuko is part of the generation ‘born free’ after Apartheid. The name speaks of the possibilities this generation has been given but also the expectations foisted on them because, even if they are free of official discrimination, it is still a far from equal society. Mazibuko grew up in the Thokoza township, and her images show some of its difficulties, the smartly-dressed people but also the impoverished fabric of the place.

“She’s an insider, and that’s very important,” Illouz notes. “She shows different generations, the intimate gestures of friends, but also this feeling of being disenchanted.” Mazibouko also suggests the complexity of being ‘an insider’, Illouz adds, pointing out how unusual it is for a young woman from the townships to do what she’s doing. Mazibuko was introduced to photography by mentoring programme Of Soul and Joy, then studied at the Market Photo Workshop, and decided to become a professional photographer then an artist.

Another documentary project follows, Coline Jourdan’s Raising the Dust. At first sight a series of images of Salsigne, a small town in southern France, it’s actually about traces of pollution there, stemming from its former gold and arsenic mine. “Pollution is a concrete reality but it is invisible,” says Illouz. “So how do you show it in photographs? It is ungraspable, unless you start looking at the marks, the very subtle traces in the landscape.”

Jourdan shows a hand raised in a peculiar gesture, for example; actually this is a reenactment of the way a child showed her wrist to a doctor, checking for arsenic-related skin damage. Other images are more experimental, Jourdan creating them by washing her prints in the polluted local river. The results are abstract but also material, physical evidence of environmental damage. It’s gentle yet also quite literally gritty.

Cutting edge

Jourdan’s work is also indicative of the shift from documentary to more exploratory works on display, François Bellabas’ An Electronic Legacy being the most obviously innovative. The project has its roots in 2016, when Bellabas spent several weeks in California and witnessed the devastating wildfires. In 2018 he fed thousands of his photographs of the fire and the apparently unremarkable suburban landscape into a first-generation AI [a Generative Antagonistic Network or GAN], to create glitchy, eerie new images.

Cut to 2023 and a new generation of AI such as ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Mid-Journey have radically shifted the boundaries. Using his hybridised database, Bellabas used AI to create a moving installation showing a nightmarish world. Fire licks and moves like a living creature; his text prompts, shown on screen, read as a kind of found poetry. It’s creepily fascinating, but more disturbing is the similarity with his documentary shots of fire, displayed opposite. The two are almost indistinguishable, prompting the question of how such horror can actually be real. “An apocalyptic landscape emerges,” notes Illouz.

Turkish artist Cemil Batur Gökçeer’s Thin Air also shows natural disasters. Involved as a rescuer after the earthquakes in 2023, he took images he didn’t want to show as straight documents. Instead his installation mixes these shots with images from other catastrophes, including loved ones’ moments of crisis, and questions the role of photography. Some of the works show more than one shot at a time, for example, others include double or even triple exposures. Throughout, he suggests the impossibility of putting neat frames around devastating events.

“In a way it’s a form of occultism or transcendence,” Illouz explains. “It’s a rereading of something that is unspeakable.” Illouz adds that Batur Gökçeer practises coffee-ground reading, a factor important enough to go in the exhibition text too; he does so less because he believes he can tell the future than because it’s a way for people to come together, she explains, to talk about intimate things.

Intimacy runs through Marilou Poncin’s installation too, titled Liquid Love is Full of Ghosts. The work combines three fictional films (plus a neon piece) exploring our emotional ties to technology. The first film shows a topless man caressing and revering a car; the second a lonely figure eating in front of a video of a fellow diner; the third someone kissing and fondling a pliable screen, an attractive woman on the display.

There are shades of David Cronenberg, and Poncin walks a fine line with the ridiculous (a group of middle-aged men is guffawing at the car-lover as I visit) but her works speak to our very real relationships with tech. “The title alludes to Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Love,” the wall text explains. “The sociologist analyses the changes affecting the individual in a society where the bonds between people have dissolved because of a constant fear of rejection. The ‘palliative’ objects in the installation fill the anxiety of solitude as much as they fit a void.”

The seventh and final artist in the 2024 Discovery Award is Matan Mittwoch. Born in Tel-Aviv and based between there and Paris, his work also explores our interface with technology. Poetically titled The Sun is Broken, his installation includes a series of images arranged in a head-height circle titled Cracks, and a very large dark print titled And the Stars Look Different Today. Both are less abstract than they first appear, and both deal with the limits of photography.

Cracks was made on a demonstration in Israel last summer, though this isn’t stated in the wall text. The red colours and apparent flashes of light are actually close-range photographs of fingers – and the cracks between them – shot when a member of the security forces put his hand over Mittwoch’s camera, preventing him from recording the protest. The large, black image looks like a shot of the cosmos, meanwhile, but is actually a photograph of sandpaper. The grains of sand are reflecting the light, but they are transformed into a smooth surface by the lens.

For Mittwoch, the last image speaks of propaganda, explains Illouz, “playing with what propaganda is, with illusion and delusion”. For her it makes for a fitting end to the show. “We end on a metaphorical note,” she observes. “Where do we go from here? Are we going to jump into the void?” France’s left wing went on to triumph in the election but with far from a majority and, with the RN still waiting in the wings, her question remains disquieting.

Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles is at various venues across the city from 01 July to 29 September 2024