On Tuesday, July 4, 2023, Kering and Les Rencontres d’Arles will present the Women In Motion Award to the great Brazilian photographer, Rosângela Rennó, during the first soirée at the Théâtre Antique d’Arles. As part of the event, she will present her work and share with the audience her personal journey and her view of women’s place in photography and society in general. A monographic exhibition, supported by Women In Motion, will be dedicated to her at La Mécanique Générale, in Arles.
This is the first major monograph organized in France about the Brazilian photographer. Her previous involvement with Les Rencontres d’Arles had been in 2013, when she received the Historical Book Award for her work on the photographs stolen from the National Library of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro.
Interested in “the way the system tries to erase or manipulate links with the past”, the photographer appropriates and transforms archival photographic material into an art installation or a book of photography. Her work is a detailed exploration of time, of forgetting, and the social and psychological changes that affect memory.
The Women In Motion Award for Photography, which has celebrated the career of an outstanding photographer every year since 2019, is accompanied by an endowment for acquiring works by the chosen artist for the Rencontres d’Arles collection. It was previously awarded to Susan Meiselas in 2019, Sabine Weiss in 2020, Liz Johnson Artur in 2021 and Babette Mangolte in 2022.
Supporting the Agnès Varda Exhibition : La Pointe Courte, Des Photographies au Film
This year, Women In Motion is particularly proud to support La Pointe courte, des photographies au film, an exhibition curated by Carole Sandrin, assisted by Elisa Magnani of the Institut pour la Photographie. The display, created with the approval of Rosalie Varda and the Ciné-Tamaris team, consists of photographs taken by Agnès Varda in the summer of 1954 before and during the shooting of the film La Pointe courte and will be on show at the Cloître Saint-Trophime during the Rencontres d’Arles.
Agnès Varda represents everything that the Women In Motion program was created for. A key figure in the program since the first edition in Cannes in 2015, she spoke on several occasions with her characteristic mixture of passion and imagination about the various battles she had fought, about feminism, and also the solutions that she envisaged – and to which she always remained committed. For the Women In Motion program, the exhibition is a way of maintaining its support for this hugely important figure in France’s artistic heritage.
Women In Motion and Les Rencontres d’Arles renew their partnership
For its 5th anniversary in Arles, Kering is pleased to both extend and deepen its long-term relationship with Les Rencontres d’Arles by committing to another five years as a Major Partner of the festival, starting in 2024.
In March 2019, Kering and Les Rencontres d’Arles announced their collaboration and the launch of the Women In Motion photography program in Arles. While continuing its sponsorship since 2016 of the Prix de la Photo Madame Figaro Award, which supports emerging female talent, Kering announced two complementary initiatives in partnership with Les Rencontres: the Women In Motion Award and the Women In Motion LAB. The latter program provides funding for long-term projects that highlight women in photography. The first edition, which ran from 2019 to 2021, funded a research project that led to the publication of a reference work – A world history of women photographers – in both French and English editions.
For the second LAB program, starting in 2021, Kering and Les Rencontres supported research to promote Bettina Grossman’s archives by the artist Yto Barrada, with an eponymous book Bettina being published and an exhibition of her work being held as part of the festival in July 2022.
The third LAB-supported project, starting in 2023, will be announced shortly.
About Rosângela Rennó
Rosângela Rennó was born in 1962 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. She currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
Her work on photographs, objects and installations is characterized by the investigation of different politics of the photographic representation and absorption and of the relations between memory and forgetfulness, by appropriating images from diverse sources, from fleamarkets and internet photos to institutional archives. Precarious, abandoned photographic archives and even ‘dead files’ have led her to engage herself on clarifying and fighting the recurring narratives of erasure and ‘structural ignorance,’ used as a strategy of historical amnesia and exclusion of a large part of the population, especially in Brazil and South Global countries. She also dedicates herself to the creation of videos and artist’s books, always in the same conceptual basis.
About Women In Motion
Kering’s commitment to women is at the heart of the Group’s priorities and extends, through Women In Motion, to the field of arts and culture, where gender inequalities are still glaring, even though creation is one of the most powerful vectors for change.
In 2015, Kering launched Women In Motion at the Festival de Cannes with the ambition of highlighting women in cinema, both in front of and behind the camera. The program has since expanded in a major way to photography, but also to art, design, choreography, and music. Through its Awards and Podcasts, the program recognizes inspirational figures and emerging female talent, while its Talks provide an opportunity for leading personalities to share their views on the representation of women in their profession.
For the past nine years, Women In Motion has been a platform of choice that contributes to changing mind sets and thinking on the place of women – and the recognition they receive – in the arts and culture.
