Au revoir, tradition!
In Hanaei's video works, the metaverse meets the socialist architecture of French artist Jean Renaudie. In the 1970s, its geometric labyrinth houses seemed at least as strange in Paris as the Metaverse does today, but they still haunt the Paris cityscape as "past futures". In a virtual reality video, the two opposing utopias of Zuckerberg and Renaudie now compete against each other in a duel - with the difference that Zuckerberg's revolution could perhaps become "the last revolution of mankind" that put an end to all other utopias of coexistence and art prepared, as Arash Hanaei says.
In Arles, the French Noémie Goudal also settles accounts with traditional photography and its illusionary character. Somewhere deep in a tropical rain forest, Goudal had her ten-foot-tall photographs of palm trees hung on wires; in such a way that they cover the real palm trees behind them. This is not a palm tree, René Magritte would say. In Goudal's video work "Inhale Exhale" (2021), these photo walls descend from the ropes, revealing the reality behind them, plunging into a swamp and rising again clean and wet to lofty heights. It all happens very slowly, but is spectacular to watch.
In another video work, the jungle photographs burn down one after the other, the fire conquering the canvas again and again from a new direction. Finally, behind the last canvas, Goudal's studio emerges, and everything else was only an afterthought. The title "Phoenix", which the series and the entire show bears, promises that new artistic possibilities will always be born from the ashes of deconstruction. Goudal is also a performance artist; in her work, photos and videos are inextricably linked: for example, when a photo that is much too dark only becomes visible with the help of a moving cone of light from the video projected over it with millimeter precision.
Transformations and revolutions in and for Arles.
In addition, Goudal stands in a long tradition of interdisciplinary artists who have always created their own niche. This is the story of the large exhibition "A Feminist Avant-Garde" with over 200 works from the Vienna Verbund collection, which was invited to the rooms of the LUMA Foundation in Arles. Among the 70 artists shown are some who preferred to sew the photo paper with needle and thread, and others who laced off their own face and captured it as a self-portrait. The alter ego, which the artist ORLAN gave birth to and held between her bare legs, only comes to life through the perfectly symmetrical photo evidence of the artist and clone. The alter ego, which the artist Tomaso Binga married, on the other hand, could appear personally with a suit and tie at the wedding with herself. Thus, photography and performance always conditioned each other.
The LUMA Foundation sits in a park of industrial halls, where factories and workshops used to be located. In Arles and the surrounding area, there is a relatively high unemployment and poverty rate. The festival, which is largely financed by ticket sales, brings important income to the city. This is another reason why the new Lord Mayor Patrick de Carolis, who has been in office since 2020, is striving for a popular re-enactment of the Rencontres. The festival must now become as broad as possible and yet as contemporary as possible. "In a post-industrial city like Arles, we inevitably have to make the transition to a cultural industry," says festival director Christoph Wiesner, who was also appointed two years ago in the midst of the corona pandemic.
In any case, this year's edition has succeeded in a wide range. A personal photo essay by Jansen van Staden about his father stands next to staged photography by Wiame Haddad, which shows the eve of Algerian independence as an eternally open door to an eternally untidy room. Sometimes private research can be carried out just as rigorously and insightful as scientific studies: Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza has worked out how her aunt Myriam disappeared into the political underground of Ecuador. Meanwhile, Jacqueline Salmon presents the largest investigation to date on Jesus Christ's loin crow, which has been subject to many trends over the centuries.
Photography has always been characterized by strong contrasts. This is shown by a retrospective of the American photographer Lee Miller, who is probably the most famous for her picture in Hitler's bathtub. However, Miller worked at the same time as a war and fashion reporter during World War II, often as both in one, without seeing a contradiction in it. She revolutionized the hitherto stiff fashion journalism, she wrote boulevardesk about the defeated Germans or the liberated French. And she mastered the balancing act of even harmonizing her fashion models with bombed-out streets, as a documentary and staging at the same time. At that time, it had been the mission of the British government to the country's photographers to offer people a little distraction and moral boost in difficult times.
