Program 2024

“Having established the LUMA Foundation 20 years ago, I am, as always, happy to share our work with our international audience that visits LUMA in Arles. Over the years, we have built incredible relationships and strong ties with outstanding artists from all over the world. This is reflected in this year’s program. We have the immense pleasure to present exhibitions by the most important contemporary voices, such as Judy Chicago, Theaster Gates, William Kentridge, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. They are artists whose work the LUMA Foundation has supported and produced in past and recent years. We are also showing pioneers such as Diana Thater, Gustav Metzger, and artists new to our ecosystem but equally important internationally, like DRIFT, Neil Beloufa and Erika Verzutti. Our programs are driven by the passion and conviction in the ideas inherent in the artists’ work and in 2024 we celebrate each and every artist we work with as well as the important partnerships and collaborations we have created with international institutions of the highest caliber.”

Maja Hoffmann, May 2024

 

This year, LUMA Arles presents a dynamic program based on exhibitions, transformative new commissions and significant collaborations and partnerships.

Premiering on May 31, LUMA Arles presents a unique outdoor performance by Dutch artists DRIFT. Electric Sky brings together groundbreaking technology using drones to recreate a constellation of stars in the night sky above Arles. Also by DRIFT, a new interactive installation titled Living Landscape is conceived in parallel to the ambitious landmark group show staged at Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, Van Gogh and the Stars.

Also opening in May, in Arles, A LOT OF PEOPLE is the first major retrospective exhibition of Rirkrit Tiravanija in Europe, in partnership with MoMA PS1. The exhibition traces four decades of the artist’s career and features over 100 works, from early experimentations with installation and film, to works on paper, photographs, ephemera, sculptures, and key participatory pieces.

Alongside these two seminal exhibitions, an installation of Diana Thater’s Practical Effects will be presented for the first time in Arles. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, Practical Effects follows a primate-like biomimetic robot who, as the last being left on Earth, has been tasked with the care and upkeep of a garden filled with intricately sculpted topiary animals.

The LUMA Foundation has long been committed to the protection of the environment in the face of the growing climate emergencies. American artist Judy Chicago, pioneer in feminist art, uses her unique language and methodology to confront ecological destruction, exploring power, mortality, birth and creation. Herstory, in partnership with the New Museum, opens in Arles on June 30. A new commission of a Smoke Sculpture will be presented in Arles during the opening days of the exhibition.

Meanwhile, an exhibition of Gustav Metzger’s work (organized by the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives), including never-before-seen archival notes and ephemera, highlights the unique practice of an artist for whom ecology and anti-capitalist activism were key tenets of his creative life.

Part of the most significant projects for LUMA Arles this is year involves the collaboration with South-African artist William Kentridge on an opera and an exhibition. Kentridge has spent the last forty years examining the colonial and racial undercurrents not only of his own native South Africa but of society at large, examining how history is transmitted through ongoing oppression in surrealist, deeply political works. His newly commissioned opera The Great Yes, The Great No will premiere at LUMA Arles this summer, alongside an exhibition of major works titled Je n’attends plus.

Black history and archival objects act as an impetus to social change and community action in the radical form of production and transformation that defines the work of Theaster Gates. His long-term project initiated in 2023 adds another layer to the exhibition at LUMA Arles transforming La Grande Halle into a site of experimental ceramic production, with visitors invited to observe the ancient, tactile craft of making with clay.

Brazilian sculptor Erika Verzutti will be in residence in Arles from May to July, a period during which she will present her new exhibition The Life of Sculptures onsite, working with materials such as clay and resin Verzutti will create a highly evocative dreamscape referencing architecture, spatial theory and bodily forms.

Two of the most significant artists of lens-based storytelling come together in Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coen, an exhibition born out of the collaboration between the great American photographer, and the celebrated film director. Spanning six decades of images produced by Friedlander, Coen’s unique selection highlights their cinematic affinity in a shared fascination with the fractured, often misleading power of images.

Finally, throughout the park, the sly persuasiveness of imagery in the digital age is explored with EBB: Me Time, a long-term research project initiated by Neïl Beloufa on the use of technology in contemporary art practice today.