Les Rencontre d’Arles: Revising Life
Elsa & Johanna. Between the Lines, Beyond the Shadows, Calgary, 2018.
Courtesy of the artists and La Forest Divonne Gallery, Paris-Bruxelles
By Gabriela Bittencourt
Founded in 1970 by Arlesian photographer Lucien Clergue, writer Michel Tournier, and historian Jean Maurice Rouquette, the Rencontre d’Arles, an annual photography festival, celebrates 50 years of photography this year. Although the city-wide festival was cancelled due to COVID-19, this does not prevent us from celebrating emerging artists. For as long as there is life, there shall be art.
In this day and age, there is a misconception that indigenous people are part of a bygone era. When their contemporaneous existence is brought to our attention, we neglect them, call them prehistoric, rather than integrating them, without assimilation. Poulomi Basu says this is an environmental injustice. And his exhibition Centralia exposes this apocryphal myth by documenting an on-going conflict between the indigenous tribal people of India and the Indian government. By focusing the camera on them, Basu brings us close to integration by centering around a marginalized community. What else Basu affords us is pure truth: all people are tribal.
Poulomi Basu. From the Centralia series, 2010- present. Courtesy of the artist.
Poulomi Basu. From the Centralia series, 2010- present. Courtesy of the artist.
Elsa & Johanna’s exhibition Find the Truth suggests that practicing empathy leads to a truth. By experimentally submerging oneself into a different person’s day-to-day life—adopting their resources, history, and upbringing—we find truths. So, when viewing these characters in the series Calgary, taking up their skin, trying it on for a change, we experience their isolation.
Elsa & Johanna. The Horizon Mall, Beyond the Shadows, Calgary, 2018. Courtesy of the artists and La Forest Vivonne Gallery, Paris-Bruxelles
Deanna Pizzitelli’s exhibition Koža, Women and Other Stories challenges our idea of biography. This project, composed of archival works and travel logs, opens our notions of truth to accept the imagined as a truth. Indeed, people are mixed bags of material and emotion. But, most importantly, we are imagination and/or creation.
Deanna Pizzitelli, Portrait, Nicaragua, 2017 (Cerro Negro, Nicaragua). Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery
Deanna Pizzitelli, Barbara / Dominikia, II, 2019 (Bratislava, Slovakia). Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Together, Poulomi Baso, Elsa & Johanna, and Deanna Pizzitelli revise life. They encourage us to be more perceptual beings and push us to rethink notions of truth and the means by which we look for it.
To view more of these works, visit the Louis Roederer Discovery Award site at Arles online.
