Pur non facendo parte del programma ufficiale dei Rencontres d’Arles, le mostre ospitate dalla Fondazione LUMA sono tra le più visitate e discusse della settimana inaugurale del festival. Sono dodici le esposizioni e i progetti attualmente in corso. Ne abbiamo scelti tre che, per motivi molto diversi tra loro, ci sono sembrati particolarmente significativi.

Industry insiders, curators, artists, and photographers all seem to agree on one thing: this year, it’s impossible to leave Arles without visiting LUMA.

Although not part of the official program of the Rencontres d’Arles, the exhibitions hosted by the LUMA Foundation are among the most visited and talked-about during the festival’s opening week. There are currently twelve exhibitions and projects on view. We’ve chosen three that, for very different reasons, struck us as particularly significant.

Gerhard Richter, “Overpainted Photographs”
Following the major exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris—which literally captivated the public’s attention during Paris Photo 2025—the relationship between Gerhard Richter and photography is explored in greater depth in Arles. “Overpainted Photographs” presents 116 small-format works in which Richter reflects on the complementarity between the photographic gesture and the painterly gesture. Since the late 1980s, the artist has been working on printed photographs by applying oil paint, enamel, or varnish, which he spreads, scrapes, and drags across the surface of the image. The result is a hybrid form of expression in which photography and painting transform one another until they merge. As Richter states in a quote featured in the exhibition: “Photography has almost no reality: it is almost one hundred percent image. Painting, on the other hand, always possesses a reality: you can touch the paint; it has a physical presence; and yet it always produces an image. Once I took some small photographs and smeared paint over them. In part, this solved the problem.” The source material comes from the artist’s personal archive: family portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, and travel photographs. Ordinary images that, once “overpainted,” are stripped of their documentary function. The image becomes unstable, open, unresolved. Small compositions with elusive contours that prompt the viewer to move closer to the glass of the frame to grasp its texture, only to step back in an attempt to reconstruct the overall image. The “Overpainted Photographs” encapsulate some of the central issues in Richter’s work: the instability of representation, the limits of perception, and the impossibility of a truly neutral gaze, which is always subject to doubt and transformation.

Camille Henrot “In the Veins”
Considered one of today’s most influential voices, the French artist Camille Henrot has developed a multidisciplinary practice over the past twenty years that spans drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and film, exploring the complexity of contemporary existence. The video work “In the Veins” addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time: what does it mean to raise children in an era marked by the climate crisis and mass extinction? At the heart of the work is what is known as “ecological grief”: the daily experience of living with a loss that seems irreversible. Henrot brings this awareness into the domestic sphere, where love, fear, responsibility, and care take on even greater intensity. The montage alternates between intimate scenes of family life and portraits of the artist’s children, close-ups of wild animals, insects, and pets, and footage shot at wildlife rehabilitation centers, where animals injured by the direct consequences of human activity are being treated. The work begins with a simple yet profound contradiction: animals populate picture books, toys, and songs, and represent one of the first tools through which children learn to name the world, yet many of those same animals are now threatened, displaced, or destined to disappear. Through a particularly refined use of sound—the narration is entrusted to the voice of a young girl who seems to be reading or interpreting a text written for her—the film reflects on this dissonance, questioning what it means to inherit an imagination still populated by animal life while bequeathing to future generations a deeply compromised planet. It is a moving work, one of extraordinary formal simplicity yet intellectually sophisticated, capable of giving voice to a sentiment that is increasingly widespread among the Millennial generation now becoming parents. A theme, however, that is still rarely addressed with clarity by contemporary art.

Soundwalk Collective & Patti Smith, “Correspondences”
Among the comments circulating in the “corridors” of the Rencontres (or rather, on the scorching sidewalks of Arles), some are already calling it “the most powerful exhibition of the festival.” Presented in the monumental spaces of the Grande Halle, “Correspondences” is an immersive installation designed to resonate viscerally with viewers, raising questions about the fragility of the present. The project stems from a collaboration between the Soundwalk Collective—led by Stephan Crasneanscki alongside producer Simone Merli—and Patti Smith. The result of over ten years of dialogue and shared research, “Correspondences” weaves together sound, poetry, and images to construct “sensory” landscapes where art, politics, science, and ecology converge. The exhibition marks the project’s first major European presentation and brings together all the audiovisual works created between 2023 and 2026, along with two new works commissioned by LUMA and set in the Camargue. Sound installations, archival materials, photographs, and prints round out the exhibition. Although the visual component is striking, sound is the true protagonist of the experience. Environmental recordings gathered from the planet’s most fragile places—melting glaciers, deserts, forests, wetlands, and contaminated sites—construct an acoustic landscape interwoven with the poems and songs of Patti Smith. Her voice takes on different identities, passing from one body to another, from one memory to another, transforming into an almost shamanic presence. Interwoven with archival footage and new footage, these soundscapes challenge the primacy of vision, allowing listening to shape, destabilize, and expand the meaning of the images. This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the entire project: reminding us, at a festival entirely dedicated to photography, that seeing is not the only way to understand the world.