François Bellabas’ works in the Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation exhibition © Louis Miralles
François Bellabas, Jury Prize and Tshepiso Mazibuko, Public Prize at the Rencontres d’Arles
09/07/2024 – Arles
Involved for more than seven years, the Louis Roederer Foundation fervently shares the Rencontres d’Arles’ desire to defend photography and its emerging actors through the Discovery Award.
François Bellabas, Winner of the 2024 Discovery Prize
Among the seven projects presented for the Discovery Award 2024, François Bellabas presented by Centre Photographique Île-de-France is awarded the Jury Prize which consists of a €15,000 grant and the acquisition of a work that will become part of the Rencontres d’Arles collection.
His innovative project An Electronic Legacy testifies to research in which artificial intelligence is now envisioned genealogically, through different generations of tools. The image, considered as data, has become the linchpin of a system in which humans move seamlessly between real and virtual spaces. The exhibition unfolds around a single motif: fire.
Tshepiso Mazibuko portrait © Frank Marshall
Tshepiso Mazibuko, Winner of the 2024 Public Prize
Tshepiso Mazibuko presented by Umhlabathi Collective (Johannesburg, South Africa) has been granted the 2024 Public’s Prize which consists in a €5,000 endowment through an acquisition. Her work delves into the experience of the “born free” generation, referring to the black generation born after the end of Apartheid (1991), to which she belongs. Through portraits of young people photographed in their daily lives in Thokoza, the photographer takes an inside look at her community. Adopting an introspective approach, the artist evokes her own frustration with the notion of “born free”, the trauma and responsibility inherited by her generation, the pervasive sense of sadness in a vulnerable place. Tshepiso Mazibuko’s images seem to be suspended in time, as in this truncated portrait where fingerprints spot the garment, where something stumbles but a form of resistance emerges.
Audrey Bazin, Artistic Director of the Louis Roederer Foundation, asks: “Does photography today stand on its own? The 2024 Discovery Prize questions both the materiality of the image and the image as reality. The winner of the 2024 Jury Prize, François Bellabas, through the use of AI, questions the different levels of reality produced by images.
The winner of the 2024 Public Prize, Tshepiso Mazibuko, on the other hand, uses the off-screen to amplify the power of what she shows.
The Discovery Prize Foundation Louis Roederer is open to all exhibition venues: galleries, art centers, associations, independent venues and institutions, which, through their pioneering work, are often the first to support emerging artists. These structures can propose the project of an artist whose work has recently been discovered or deserves to be discovered by an international audience.
