Rencontres d’Arles 2023: What to See During Opening Week

The annual photography festival Rencontres d’Arles returns to Arles, France for its 54th year of programming, on view at art spaces and heritage sites around the city from July 3 to September 24. The 2023 edition brings a lineup of five encompassing exhibition themes—From Film to Stills, Representations, Revisiting, Mapping the Eye, and Reminiscence(s)—that include multiple focused exhibitions, accompanied by a roster of opening week festivities like talks, tours, and more, taking place through July 9.

While the festival’s many presentations include work by photographers from the present moment and years past, including names from across the globe, viewers will find that careful curation and the thoughtful talents of the featured artists manage to build an ongoing dialogue that strongly represents our current global reality.

“Strange as it may seem, every year, like a seismograph of our times, the Rencontres d’Arles capture our world’s state of consciousness,” said Christoph Wiesner, Director of the Rencontres d’Arles. “Its photographers, artists, and curators help us to see, to perceive, with keener acuteness, the transformations we are living through. Awareness—at the very least—of climate change has become unavoidable, directly affecting our habits.”

In this vein, the 2023 programming features a string of climate- and earth-focused exhibitions exploring the Arlesian territory, in collaboration with Cité Anthropocène in Lyon, which exist throughout the festival’s encompassing exhibition themes. For example, Nelly Monnier and Eric Tabuchi’s “Grey Sun” catalogs the territory, while Mathieu Asselin’s “Here Near” looks to the location’s industrial areas. Also examining the locale is the group show, “Lights of Saints,” representing the annual pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in honor of Saint Sara, and Yohanne Lamoulère’s “The River’s Children,” looking to the nearby Rhône Delta in Camargue.

Other highlights to look for include presentations in Representations like “Optical Theater” by Arélien Froment working in collaboration with the estate of Pierre Zucca, and an exhibition of contemporary Nordic photography entitled “Søsterskap,” which takes on a viewpoint of intersectional feminism. Encompassed in Mapping the Eye, Garush Melkonyan’s “Cosmovision” imagines a modern-day follow-up to a 1977 NASA initiative for extraterrestrial intelligence. Nieves Mingueza’s “One in Three Women,” presented by Peckham 24 in London, poses questions about gender-based crimes, based on alarming statistics (part of Emergences), and in “Don’t Forget Me,” Jean-Marie Donat has curated a selection of portraits taken of North African immigrants from the archives of Studio Rex, presented in Reminiscence(s).

A daily calendar of events throughout the opening week is not to be missed. These include happenings like exhibition tours with the photographers and curators, a series of book signings, screenings, and a number of roundtables, symposiums, and conversations, including those like “Which Images for Which Ecology?” featuring a lineup of scientists and artists alike, and the discussion “Public Commission in Photography.”