Since its creation, the Rencontres d'Arles has promoted photography and all its stakeholders, from photographers to artists, curators and publishers. With this in mind, the Rencontres d’Arles associates the Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation with all exhibition spaces: through their trailblazing work, galleries, art centers, non-profits, independent venues and institutions are often the first to support emerging artists. This year, 10 shortlisted projects are featured in a single show, curated by Tanvi Mishra. She and scenographer Amanda Antunes showcase the emerging scene, in an innovative and sustainable manner, at one of the festival’s signature sites, the Église des Frères-Prêcheurs. During opening week, a jury will bestow the Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation, which comes with an acquisition worth €15,000, upon an artist and the project’s supporting organization, and the public will vote for the Public Award, which carries with it an acquisition worth €5,000.



How we see is a function of our individual condition(s). This cohort of artists is bound by this notion of shifting perception and photography’s potential to embody meaning beyond what it apparently displays. By harnessing the inherent ambiguity of the image, they present us with alternative visions of what surrounds us, while also nudging us to interrogate our expectations of the photograph itself.

Rather than fit a theme, the works are united through a proposition ‒ that the evolving relationship between the spectator and the image is constantly shaped by personal memory as well as the apparatus of viewing. This premise, activated through one selected artist’s work, provides a lens to view the rest. It compels us to consider our own role in the unquestioning consumption of what lies before us, and to what extent we absorb and advance society’s conventions and clichés. What do we expect to see when we speak of death in a historically oppressed community? How do we imagine everyday patriarchies that are liminal and dominant at the same time? Is it possible for the image to serve as a document of a crime that no one witnessed?

Moving between fiction and tableaux, visual research and new media, these artists expand beyond the direct interpretations that often define documentary practice. They warp, split and mark the photographic image, inducing meaning onto its surface. Others perform ‒ as an act of assertion and reclamation ‒ animating themselves in the frame to fill in the deficiencies of the historical, canonized photograph.

These perspectives, a majority of which have emerged from historically under-represented authorships, uphold the spirit of the contemporary and depart from the traditional. They desire to shift discourse, moving away from catastrophic representations. They reject the mainstream archive, intervening with their own radical renditions. Each work emanates from the personal, informing its subjective position. By acknowledging our own subjectivities as spectators, and the position of spectator as stakeholder, these artists ask us to labour with them in reconfiguring how we see the world.

Tanvi Mishra


→ IBRAHIM AHMED (Kuwait / Egypt) and LINA GEOUSHY (Egypt / United Kingdom) 
presented by par TINTERA (Egypt / United Kingdom)

→ SOUMYA SANKAR BOSE (India)
presented by EXPERIMENTER (India)

→ SAMANTHA BOX (Jamaica / United States)
presented by TIGER STRIKES ASTEROID (United States)

→ PHILIPPE CALIA (France / India)
presented by  TARQ (India)

→ MD FAZLA RABBI FATIQ (Bangladesh)
presented by PATHSHALA SOUTH ASIAN MEDIA INSTITUTE (Bangladesh)

→ HIEN HOANG (Vietnam / Germany)
presented by FLORIDA LOTHRINGER 13 (Germany) 

→ VISHAL KUMARASWAMY (India)
presented by PARTY OFFICE (India)

→ NIEVES MINGUEZA (Spain / United Kingdom)
presented by PECKHAM 24 (United Kingdom) 

→ ISADORA ROMERO (Ecuador)
presented by r MAGNUM FOUNDATION (United States)

→ RITI SENGUPTA (India)
presented by JOJO (India)