For the summer of 2012, the LUMA Foundation proposes an artistic programme that gives the inhabitants of Arles and the visitors to the city the chance to encounter the work and ideas of several contemporary visual artists. This programme includes a new form of exhibition taking place in the Roman amphitheatre of Arles, titled To the Moon via the Beach; the presentation of the LUMA Award to the artist Helen Marten, and ‘The Library is on Fire’, an experimental form of library that creates new encounters between fiction and reader. The LUMA Foundation has worked for the past three years with a group of internationally renowned artists and curators as its artistic advisors. Known as the Core Group, they currently include artists Philippe Parreno and Liam Gillick together with Tom Eccles (Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York), Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Gallery, London) and Beatrix Ruf (Kunsthalle Zurich). The members of this group have often worked together in the past. For example, Philippe Parreno and Liam Gillick first collaborated on an exhibition in 1995 when they created together the exhibition Moral Maze at the Consortium in Dijon, followed by the exhibition The Trial of Pol Pot at Le Magasin in Grenoble in 1998. In 2007, they worked together again with Hans Ulrich Obrist to create a new form of exhibition with Il Tempo del Postino (Postman Time), which travelled internationally. Following that highly successful model, Maja Hoffmann has invited Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Tom Eccles, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Beatrix Ruf to create an exhibition for Arles that takes visitors to the moon, via the beach. The exhibition To the Moon via the Beach takes place in the Roman amphitheatre of Arles from 5-8 July 2012. A historical site popular with tourists and often used for bullfighting and festivals, the amphitheatre will be in constant transformation for the duration of the exhibition. At the start, visitors will encounter an arena covered in tons of specially shipped sand. Over the course of the exhibition, the terrain will slowly be transformed from a beach to a moonscape by a team of world-class sand sculptors led by Wilfred Stijger (NL). This site under constant motion will act as a backdrop to a series of interventions from twenty interna- tionally recognised artists who will guide visitors, react to the shifting landscape, and produce works in and around the arena. The invited artists include: Uri Aran, Daniel Buren, Elvire Bonduelle, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Loretta Fahrenholz, Fischli & Weiss, Jef Geys, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster / Ari Benjamin Meyers, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Klara Liden, Renata Lucas, Benoît Maire, Oscar Murillo, Anri Sala, Pilvi Takala, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tris Vonna-Michell, Lawrence Weiner. This unusual exhibition, whose form is decided by the collective dynamics of the assembled artists, reflects the explorative character of this period prefiguring the programme of the new creation, production, exhibition center, specialised in contemporary art, that the LUMA Foundation plans in the Parc des Ateliers with the American architect Frank Gehry. This is also manifested in the re-use of the sand brought into Arles to create this shifting landscape. After the exhibition, all the sand will be moved to the Parc des Ateliers site, where it will be accessible to the general public as part of a temporary playground, before being re-used once again in the foundations for the building designed by the American architect.

Tom Eccles, Liam Gillick, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno and Beatrix Ruf, curators of the exhibition.