Les Rencontres d'Arles Les Rencontres d'Arles : expositions, stage de photographie / exhibitions, workshops photo

Klavdij Sluban, photographer, and Laurent Tixador, visual artist, are the first recipients of the Atelier des Ailleurs residency. The Atelier des Ailleurs is an arts residency in the exceptional context of the Kerguelen Islands. It aims to offer two artists conditions beneficial to creativity and experimentation in a place without a permanent population and almost exclusively taken over by the scientific community. The two artists stayed for three months at Port-aux-Français, mingling in with the daily life of the scientific teams, to the rhythm of expeditions and rotations. The works presented at the Rencontres d’Arles are the result of work realised during this residency. The gaze they bring is not illustrative or descriptive, but fits within a logic that favours the relocation of artistic practice. Open to individual artists, the call for applications launched internationally received 440 artists’ projects. A jury composed of four state representatives (the minister in charge of Overseas Territories, TAFF, the minister of Culture and Communication, DAC-OI) and four personalities from the world of the arts (Erika Hoffmann, Caroline Smulders, Isabelle Gaudefroy and Antoine de Galbert), got together last October in Paris to select the two winning artists. Located in the Southern Hemisphere, fifteen days by sea from the Réunion Island, the islands of the Kerguelen Archipelago, once named the ‘Devastation Islands’, do not have a permanent population, but host, depending on the bases, from thirty to one hundred scientific and technical personnel, who stay there from six months to a year.

For this residency, Klavdij Sluban presents a project dealing with photography and its different formats, in black and white. It highlights the very themes he deals with: travels and claustration.

Laurent Tixador has chosen to help scientists. Erasing his own work to emphasize the ones of the scientific community working on the islands, he shows his desire to comprehend nature’s diversity, to live different and unique experiences, confronting himself with specific points of view on landscapes.

Exhibition jointly offered by the Administration des Terres australes et Antarctiques Françaises (Taaf) and the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication /Direction des Affaires Culturelles—Océan Indien (Dac-oI) and with the support of Air France.

www.sluban.com

www.laurenttixador.com

Klavdij Sluban

Born in 1963 in Paris.

Lives and works in Paris.

Klavdij Sluban is the recipient of the European Publishers Award for Photography (EPAP Prize, 2009), Leica Prize (2004) and the Niepce Prize (2000). Often imbued with literary references, his slowly evolving photographic cycles turn their backs on immediate and sensational current affairs. From the Balkans to the Black Sea, the former Soviet Union to China, Central America to the Kerguelen Islands, Klavdij Sluban’s journeys can be read as an encounter between the reality of the moment and the inner feelings of this photographer assailed by the impulse to wander. Fiercely independent, he develops rigorous and coherent work, making him one of the most interesting “art” photographers of his generation. Since 1995, in the process of questioning enclosed spaces and encircled horizons, he has been running workshops with young prison inmates. This commitment, which began in France (Fleury-Mérogis prison), was then pursued in disciplinary camps in Easter Europe and most recently with the Maras in Central America.

Laurent Tixador

Born in 1965 in Colmar.

Lives and works in Nantes.

An art adventurer, Laurent Tixador sets up projects about utopian subjects and carries out extreme actions. Hence, he undertook several expeditions to Greenland, before becoming the first artist to reach the North Pole. “What interests Laurent Tixador is the re-experimentation of pre-technological situations and the research into primordial gestures and materials, while clearly being situated in the context of the beginning of the 21st century. A critical vision? More like putting reality and our ways of grasping it to the test. A kind of deceleration manoeuvre, a sideways approach to the contemporary human condition, a very healthy disconnecting of man/modernity, even when this proves to be eminently of today” writes Jean-Marc Huitorel. For the Atelier des Ailleurs, Tixador has chosen to put himself at the service of the scientists. By deliberately effacing his own creative output to the benefit of the work carried out by the scientific community on Kerguelen Islands, his desire is to comprehend nature through various specialities, and to live singular experiences so as to conform to specific visions of the landscape.

Atelier de Mécanique

> 23 September

10 am to 8 pm

11 €