Noémie Goudal in Numéro Magazine

The dormant nature of Noémie Goudal

For about ten years, Noémie Goudal has been deploying a polymorphic visual work whose anchor remains the same: the landscape and its perception. Her trompe-l'oeil photographs, integrating into natural settings even their reproductions at scale 1 to disturb their apprehension, constantly question the boundaries between nature and artifice, between freedom and control. In his exhibition at the Trinitarian Church of Arles, the practice of the artist known mainly for his photographs takes on another dimension with the unveiling of two unpublished films. Behind pictures of fragmented palm groves mounted on a fence, we discover the moving images of a shaken nature, by fire on a first screen, and by water on the second. Noémie Goudal pushes her trompe-l'oeil work a notch: in the first film, plant paintings follow one another slowly, consumed by the flames to reveal their background, as a mise en abyme of the burning landscape, as much as a symbolic representation of the physical image frozen by the decomposing impression, in favor of the digital image in motion. In the second, palm trees photographed and printed on panels flow slowly into a body of fresh water, suspended by pulleys, until they disappear under the flat surface before reappearing. While the soothing sounds of tropical nature and these processes of destruction cleverly orchestrated by the artist resonate simultaneously in the church, his sense of dramaturgy appears here more powerful than ever while the meticulous and poetic expression of ecological disasters emanates from it.

From Birgit Jürgenssen to Martha Wilson, 72 major figures of the feminist avant-garde of the 1970s

The 1970s marked a real turning point in the West: in a context of sexual revolution, many artists used their practices to defend their rights and rethink their representations, contributing to the creation of a so-called “avant-garde” art. feminist guard”, as Gabriele Schor, curator and founder of the Verbund collection in Vienna, describes it. In her exhibition presented at the Mécanique générale, whose title takes up this expression, the curator brings together the works of 72 representatives of this movement, all from her collection. Through five themes, we explore how these artists were able, through their practice, to question or even denounce the place of women in society as much as to contribute to their emancipation. Thus, works such as the photographs of Valie Export or Birgit Jürgenssen criticize the role of housewife and housewife to which the fairer sex has been confined for centuries, to the point of very literally evoking confinement in the domestic straitjacket, as the Dutch woman did in 1978 Lydia Schouten, during a 1978 performance where she staged herself naked, trying to escape from an iron cage. The other parts of the exhibition focus sometimes on the explicit representation of sexuality, where artists such as Lynda Benglis, Judy Chicago or Penny Slinger break the taboos linked to menstruation, pleasure and the female sex, sometimes on representations of body through the questioning of the canons of beauty, conveyed by magazines and advertising campaigns, that artists likeCindy Sherman , Martha Wilson, Annette Messager or even Ana Mendieta have largely hijacked them. An extremely rich corpus that ends with the photograph of Orlan  “giving birth to her-loves me”, a symbolic and powerful way of affirming the emancipation of women and their right to be able to present themselves to the world as they see fit. .

Frida Orupabo's collages, between humor, surrealism and commitment

It is not surprising to find Frida Orupabo in the precincts of General Mechanics,a few meters from the feminist avant-garde exhibition. If the practice of the Norwegian artist of Nigerian origin began in the 2010s, it is an extension of his elders through his physical or digital collages of female figures, drawing both on images from historical archives only in online amateur videos. In these works, the 30-year-old breaks down and recomposes the bodies of black women, which she fixes with Parisian fasteners like a cardboard puppet. Frozen in melancholy, erotic or sometimes warlike attitudes, like riding an ebony horse, their bodies and their faces assembled in proportions beyond reality come to transform representations long locked up or even reified by colonial history, systems of domination and racism. Beyond these collages oscillating between humour, surrealism and commitment, the artist also unveils in the exhibition a gridded video in nine square screens where texts, photos and video extracts follow one another, like an account Instagram which would unroll the fragments of a constantly renewed history of women.

India seen by Mitch Epstein in a Romanesque abbey

To the northeast of Arles is a jewel of Romanesque architecture: the Abbey of Saint-Pierre de Montmajour, founded in 948 by Benedictine monks. If the stone building once housed a monastery, it was following the French Revolution classified as a historical monument, open to visitors and even inspired artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, who made drawings there in the last years of his life. On the occasion of the photography festival, the historic site hosts a whole section of the work of the American Mitch Epstein. A great traveler, the now 70-year-old artist has traveled his country over the decades with his camera, captured the energy of New York, but also that of Berlin or Vietnam. Here, it is one of the most beautiful projects of the photographer that we discover, dedicated to a major country in the history of his career, India, where man went eight times between the late 1970s and the late 1980s. The resulting prolific series reveals both the profusion of the city of Bombay, from dawn to the middle of the night, and the rural landscapes of the state of Karnataka, up to the national parade in the country's capital, New Deli - an extremely rich corpus of which only a third was until then known to the public. During the lockdown, the artist took the time to dive back into the contact plates of this period and had the first copies of several dozen of his images drawn, offering the opportunity to discover, in an exceptional historical setting, a whole unprecedented part of his work on the second most populous country in the world.

The intimate abstractions of Bettina Grossman

In November 2021, Bettina Grossman - known as Bettina - died at the age of 94. If the artist has lived for nearly a century, his career in painting, photography or sculpture has been rather discreet, especially across the Atlantic. However, the best-known event of her career remains her experience in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where she lived for more than fifty years. Within the walls of this mythical Manhattan building, the American has made a large number of works reflecting both her relationship to the American metropolis, to the so special and domestic atmosphere of this place of passage, but also to the conceptual art and abstraction in which her multidisciplinary practice has been brilliantly inscribed. At the Rencontres d'Arles, the artist is celebrated by her first monograph in France thanks to the co-commission of Gregor Huber and photographer Yto Barrada, who met her during the making of a documentary about her and maintained a privileged relationship with her until the end of her life. In the small space of the Henri-Comte room, we discover both the pages of his notebooks filled with colorful motifs, his paintings reproducing geometric shapes on canvas or paper or his small wooden sculptures, where these shapes are nested and superimposed in the volume. The photographs of the artist presented in the exhibition are a visual reflection of her plastic research: over the New York streets that she has long surveyed, Bettina has translated on her films the alignment of urban lighting, the orthogonal structures of buildings and the floor markings delimiting roads, but also staged her own sculptures, giving them to read differently by skillful lighting games. A video of passers-by of the Big Apple filmed from the floors of a building also reveals a more unknown part of the artist's research, who carefully studied the movements of bodies to better transcribe them into abstraction.

Lee Miller: from fashion photography to war photography, portrait of a complete artist

When we dive back into magazine photography of the first half of the 20th century in the West, Lee Miller emerges today as a major figure. The American, who has long been reduced to her role as a model, has had a prolific career driven by her ambition and independence in a sector still largely dominated by men, but also by her great versatility, reproduced in the exhibition currently dedicated to her by the festival. Presented in the Espace Van Gogh, which honors historical photographers every summer, the latter focuses on the densest chapter of his career, from the creation of his own studio in New York in 1932 to the end of the war in 1945. Close to the surrealists and in particular to Man Ray, who helped train her in shooting during her stay in Paris, the photographer then quickly distinguished herself in the art of portraiture and self-portrait, attracting the attention of magazines such as English and American Vogue, for which she worked regularly for years. Organized in two parts, the exhibition opens on the most seductive part of Lee Miller's career, from his advertising campaigns for Chanel, for hat or lingerie brands to his fashion series testifying to the British trends of the 1930s and 1940s, to his intimate portraits of illustrious women such as the writer Colette or actresses like Dorothy Hale. Then the tone changes abruptly in the last room. In 1942, while Europe was upset by the Second World War, Lee Miller was accredited by the American army to restore the conflict from the point of view of the allied forces in the pages of the English Vogue. The glamour of elegant women is then followed by the violence of images of dead deportees and crematoria in the Dachau and Buchenwald camps, SS guards mutilated in prisons or women with shaved heads in the courts, accused of collaborating with the Germans. However, female glory emerges in the image of war workers and women engaged in the navy who contributed to the victory of the allied forces, which also reflect all the sensitivity and talent of the photographer to summon emotion in all circumstances.

Lukas Hoffmann, fine detail photographer

The black paint on a wall crumbles to bring out the white of the raw stone. The slanting stalk of tall grass springs from a pile of snow, like the only plant that would survive the winter. The shadow cast by the sun under a roof segments the bitumen like a tangram of shades of grey. With Lukas Hoffmann, the “ punctum ”, as Roland Barthes theorized it, this point of detail supposed to catch the spectator, arises from the most ordinary spectacle to illustrate the passage of time. In the shadow of a dead end, at the edge of a forest or behind a street corner, the 41-year-old Swiss photographercaptures the corners of reality without ever altering them. Everything lies in the framing, the light and the contrasts - often supported by black and white -, the depth of field, the richness of the details... To underline them, the artist has been working for twenty years in the camera, a bulky device that may seem archaic today to smartphone enthusiasts, but that the photographer appreciates for its slowness of use, the antithesis of the snapshot or the burst image. “ I make photographs that are part of the tradition of painting”, says the one who insists on mastering all the stages of the shot, from printing to framing. At the Rencontres d'Arles, the forty-year-old presents several sets of works, including the polyptych of a chipped wall, like damaged skin, the peeling of which draws, on its six panels, a veritable fresco. On the other hand, we will find twenty-five prints from his Strassenbilder series, photos of passers-by in the streets of Berlin, which he says he grabbed “ like a pickpocket ”. Two projects that testify to a true culmination of photography, where the image manages to make its subject disappear behind its masterful graphic power.