Les Rencontres d’Arles

07.07 – 21.09 / 2014
Different Venues, Arles

The Rencontres d’Arles (formerly known as the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles) is a summer photography festival founded in 1970 by Arles photographer Lucien Clergue, author Michel Tournier and historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette. This year, three artists from America latina are presented.

Vik Muniz – ALBUM
Born in 1961 in São Paulo.

Album presents two new bodies of work – the eponymous Album series as well as Postcards from Nowhere. Muniz continues to explore the contemporary fragmented visual experience, with an increased emphasis on nostalgia and the materiality of photography. The Album series utilizes found personal photographs collected by Muniz over a number of years. The images composed are of familiar scenes that may be found in family photo albums. These images reflect intimate yet universal narratives. With the proliferation of inexpensive cameras in the late 20th century, and by the ease and speed of digital documentation in more recent years, such images have become more common and less precious. Album questions the implications of these shifts in technology and image-making, and their impact on community, collective experience, and memory. Postcards from Nowhere is similarly concerned with issues of loss and the dissemination of images. The Postcards depict lost or drastically changed popular destinations—the Twin Towers in the New York Financial District, a once-luxurious beach in Beirut—that have been affected by technology as well as violence.

Église des Trinitaires
7 July to 7 September
10 am – 7.30 pm

Discovery Award 2014
Alexis Fabry, a curator specialising in Latin American photography and the founder of Toluca Editions in Paris has selected two artists

Miguel Mitlag – T.V. SET
Born in 1969 in Buenos Aires.

The photographs of the T.V. Set series dramatically engage the theatrical space of actual television sets of private television stations (the point of reference would be small, perhaps alternative or experimental, television channels). Each photograph proposes a new set as it portrays a single physical space. The idea behind this project is to invert the creative order, to propose spaces for a thematic use as if the content could be determined by the way the space is arranged and furnished.

I re-enact forbidden spaces, soft and unstable surfaces, idle times. I do

research into something that is or could be dysfunctional. I engage history and the power of desire. I try to produce alterations. This is a sort of reverse or pseudo-realism. A system that attempts to be useful and useless at the same time, taking full advantage of its own contradiction. I work with objects and everyday materials from the grammar of the perception that these materials provide. It’s as if I had a malleable material in my hands and I reformulated its principles, structure and purpose.

Victor Robledo
Born in 1949 in Bogotá.

In this very abstract series of images I exhibit in Arles, I show compositions derived from studying the incidence of light in space through the image of shadows. I have had always a strong interest on how light affects the ephemeral perception of time. I am interested in the emotional quality of light, its harmony and consonance.

In these photographs there is a clear intention not to resemble reality but take it as a starting point. They are evocative images opened to visual interpretation that trigger a chain of personal associations detached from almost any recognizable features.

Pictures of light while images of sensations seem impossible to photograph. Light, fire and water, allow me to recall moments of illusions that illuminate the synthesis of the immemorial. There is a clear intention on considering the beauty of nature and the need to immerse myself in it to capture its essence.

More than represent, these images relate with the spectator because they are an intimate process of observation of light: what to look for in the pictures I select is something that floats between reality and dreams.
Victor Robledo

Discovery Award 2014
Atelier de Chaudronnerie
7 July to 21 September
10 am – 7.30 pm