On Tuesday, July 4, 2023, Kering and Les Rencontres d'Arles will present the Women In Motion Award to the great Brazilian photographer, Rosângela Rennó, during the first soirée at the Théâtre Antique d'Arles. As part of the event, she will present her work and share with the audience her personal journey and her view of women’s place in photography and society in general. A monographic exhibition will be dedicated to her at la Mécanique Générale. 

This is the first major monograph organized in France about the Brazilian photographer. Her previous involvement with Les Rencontres d'Arles had been in 2013, when she received the Historical Book Award for her work on the photographs stolen from the National Library of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro.

Interested in "the way the system tries to erase or manipulate links with the past", the photographer appropriates and transforms archival photographic material into an art installation or a book of photography. Her work is a detailed exploration of time, of forgetting, and the social and psychological changes that affect memory.

The Women In Motion Award for Photography, which has celebrated the career of an outstanding photographer every year since 2019, is accompanied by an endowment for acquiring works by the chosen artist for the Rencontres d'Arles collection. It was previously awarded to Susan Meiselas in 2019, Sabine Weiss in 2020, Liz Johnson Artur in 2021 and Babette Mangolte in 2022.


About Rosângela Rennó
Rosângela Rennó was born in 1962 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. She currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
Her work on photographs, objects and installations is characterized by the investigation of different politics of the photographic representation and absorption and of the relations between memory and forgetfulness, by appropriating images from diverse sources, from fleamarkets and internet photos to institutional archives. Precarious, abandoned photographic archives and even 'dead files' have led her to engage herself on clarifying and fighting the recurring narratives of erasure and ‘structural ignorance,’ used as a strategy of historical amnesia and exclusion of a large part of the population, especially in Brazil and South Global countries. She also dedicates herself to the creation of videos and artist’s books, always in the same conceptual basis.