19 - Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation - The best possible way to tell the truth...

Jul 6, 2026 – Oct 4, 2026

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, the selected projects are once again presented as a single cohesive exhibition, curated from selection to installation by curator Nadine Hounkpatin. 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.   The removal of a historical photograph of a slave’s flogged back from exhibition spaces in US national parks,1 the censorship of a painting by Amy Sherald in Washington, and the cancellation of an exhibition dedicated to Caribbean art at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, led me to consider the place of images in the construction of reality, and consequently, truth. These attempts at suppression are more than simple erasures: they question the fragility of accounts, whether historical or not. They remind us of how memories can be displaced, neutralized, and even sometimes confiscated. How can truth be told through photography? How, perhaps, can it be represented? Photography is not simply a neutral window on the world. As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay insists, it is “a political act, inscribed within regimes of visibility”,2 these systems-battlefields where power relations are enforced and which determine what can be seen, how, and in what context. Drawing on the words of American photographer Carrie Mae Weems,3 I sought routes to reflection rather than answers. The seven artists of the 2026 Discovery Award offered me flashes and sparks of insight by opening up interstices. The exhibition unfolds as a field of propositions where artists, from their respective singularities, form the many facets of a prism of shared truth. The practices of Charlotte Yonga, Souleymane Bachir Diaw, Phan Quang, Amira Lamti, Jordan Beal, Mallory Lowe Mpoka and Magali Paulin thus make photography a common space of relationships, engagement and responsibility. Their visual narratives, rooted in multiple cultural, historical and intimate contexts, poetically animate the body, the archive, gesture and ritual. They devise forms of visibility in which subjectivity becomes a critical force and photography challenges and overturns certain imagery, revealing what has been obscured. Their works reveal layers, zones of resistance and that which persists, collectively reminding us that photographic truth is definitely not to be found but to be patiently crafted through the friction of situated, constructed narratives, with acute attention to silence. Nadine Hounkpatin   The selected projects for the 2026 Discovery award louis roederer foundation are: — Jordan Beal,  presented by  La Station Culturelle, Martinique, France — Souleymane Bachir Diaw, presented by Lai.ma, Paris, France — Amira Lamti, presented by Doors, Paris, France — Mallory Lowe Mpoka, presented by  Occurrence, Montreal, Canada — Magali Paulin, presented by  doubledummy, Arles, France — Phan Quang, presented by  Galerie Bao, Paris, France — Charlotte Yonga, presented by Fondation H, Antananarivo, Madagascar