2026 Exhibition Program

Delta
Verena Paravel

LUMA Arles is pleased to present Delta, a major new film commission by artist and filmmaker Verena Paravel, developed as part of her wider research project, Cosmofonia. Filmed in the unique ecosystem of the Rhône river delta, the work explores the fragile and often invisible lives of the many species that inhabit the wetlands of the Camargue.

In Delta, Paravel approaches the landscape as a dense field of relationships, where human and nonhuman lives are intertwined. Through innovative camera techniques and experimental sound recording, she creates an immersive sensory experience that shifts perception away from human centrality, attuning viewers to other rhythms, other agencies, and other forms of presence. The film reveals a world in which boundaries between species, bodies, and environments are porous, and where life and death unfold as part of continuous processes of transformation.

Paravel’s approach challenges conventional hierarchies of perception, proposing film as a tool to encounter other modes of being. Image and sound operate as instruments of attention, revealing the delta as a space where multiple temporalities and life cycles coexist.

Delta extends Paravel’s radical exploration of cinema as a means to encounter a plural world, a world composed of many voices, and many ways of inhabiting the earth. Paravel asserts film as a medium of contact, advancing a body of work that is fundamentally altering the sensorial and conceptual terrain of contemporary practices.

Overpainted Photographs
Gerhard Richter

LUMA Arles presents an exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s Overpainted Photographs, one of the most decisive and uncompromising bodies of work within his six-decade practice. By intervening directly onto photographic snapshots with layers of oil paint, Richter dismantles the photograph’s authority as a stable record of reality. The image is neither fully revealed nor fully obscured but becomes transformed into a contested surface where representation and abstraction collide.

In these concentrated works, Richter subjects the photographic image to gesture, chance, and material force. The painted marks interrupt the image’s descriptive function, shifting it from a vehicle of evidence to a space of ambiguity. What appears is no longer a document, but an event that exposes how memory, perception, and meaning are continuously constructed and undone.

Overpainted Photographs articulate questions that run through Richter’s practice, such as the limits of representation, the instability of truth, and the conditions under which images shape belief. The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to encounter these quiet yet radical works, underscoring their enduring relevance and their profound influence on contemporary artistic discourse. In a time defined by the proliferation and manipulation of images, Richter’s Overpainted Photographs stand as foundational works, redefining the image as a site of uncertainty, resistance, and transformation.

In the Veins
Camille Henrot

LUMA Arles is proud to present the European premiere of In the Veins, a major new film by Camille Henrot, co-produced by LUMA. Conceived as an immersive moving-image work, the film delves into the invisible circulations that shape human experience—emotions, beliefs, desires, and inherited narratives that flow through individuals and across generations. Henrot approaches these forces as both intimate and systemic, revealing how inner lives are inseparable from the social, cultural, and symbolic structures that surround them.

At its core, In the Veins explores the invisible circulations that shape human experience, such as emotions, beliefs, and inherited narratives that pass between generations and bind individuals to larger systems of meaning. Henrot reflects on tenderness and care as fundamental yet increasingly fragile conditions, particularly in our relationships with children and the animal world. Though omnipresent in the symbolic universe of childhood, animals progressively disappear from adult life, mirroring a broader estrangement from nature and revealing a profound cultural dissonance. Set against the inescapable horizon of the climate crisis, the work confronts the emotional complexity of raising children in a time marked by uncertainty, grief, and anticipation.

Drawing on anthropology, psychology, and ecology, Henrot approaches care and nature as cyclical rather than linear processes, challenging dominant narratives of progress and control. The film unfolds as a sensorial and reflective space in which vulnerability and interdependence emerge as essential conditions of existence.

This major new film marks a significant development in Henrot’s practice and affirms LUMA Arles’s role as a space for experimentation and production, accompanying artists in creating works that help us navigate and reimagine our shared future.

100 Years of Cahiers d’Art and LUMA Arles

In 2026, Cahiers d’Art celebrates its hundredth anniversary with an international program including exhibitions in major museums, a jubilee publication, a series of talks, and presentations. Together, these initiatives honor the publication’s enduring influence while reaffirming its founding ambition to create a forum where the past, present, and future of art enter into dialogue.

Since its founding, Cahiers d’Art has played a defining role in the intellectual history of modern and contemporary art. Its pages brought together artists, writers, and thinkers at pivotal moments of aesthetic transformation, shaping how modern art was discussed, interpreted, and historicized. Today, its archive stands not only as a record of this history but as a dynamic site through which the past can be revisited and reconsidered.

This perspective resonates with the approach of the LUMA Arles Living Archives Program, which treats archives not as static repositories but as active systems that influence what can be remembered, interpreted, and transmitted.

The Cahiers d’Art archive presentation at LUMA Arles reveals moments that made modern and contemporary art legible while also exposing artists, ideas, and geographies that remained marginal or overlooked. To revisit this archive is to confront the foundations of how art is seen, interpreted, and valued. Reactivated, the archive becomes a space of renewed discovery, where forgotten images, experimental gestures, and overlooked contributions challenge established narratives and ensure that new futures for artistic knowledge can emerge.

Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 6: Zaha Hadid ‘I Think There Should Be No End to Experimentation’
Zaha Hadid

The sixth chapter of Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives, honours the tenth anniversary of Dame Zaha Hadid’s passing (b. 31/10/1950, Baghdad, Iraq – d. 31/03/2016, Miami, Florida, USA). This exhibition revisits the long conversation between the curator and the legendary architect, which began in the late 1990s when Obrist invited Hadid to realise Meshworks at the Villa Medici in 2000. Hadid was a trustee of the Serpentine from 1996, and she designed its inaugural Pavilion in 2000 invited by Julia Peyton-Jones. Following Obrist’s appointment at the Serpentine in 2006, she participated in several of its Marathons and later designed the Serpentine North Gallery in 2013.

For the first time since 2016, the exhibition brings together her early calligraphic paintings and notebooks—exercises in Suprematist geometry that informed her built projects, from the Vitra Fire Station (1993) to the CMA CGM Tower (2011) in Marseille or Pierresvives (2012) in Montpellier—along with previously unseen video interviews from 2001 to 2013. Presented in The Tower designed by the late Frank Gehry, a close friend of Hadid’s, the show spans three chapters of her career as an architect: from Constructivism to her early projects and reception in the French context, and her longstanding relationship with Obrist.

In close collaboration with the Zaha Hadid Foundation.

In Search of Incredible
Julianknxx

LUMA Arles is proud to present In Search of Incredible, a new exhibition by Sierra Leone-born, London-based poet, artist, and filmmaker Julianknxx, featuring a major new commission. Working across film, sound, and performance, the artist has developed a singular practice that brings poetry into dialogue with moving-image, creating works where memory is carried, spoken, and continually reshaped. His work explores the resonances of migration and diaspora, weaving intimate narratives with collective histories, and giving presence to voices and experiences often absent from dominant accounts.

At the center of the exhibition, the new commission unfolds as an immersive environment in which image, sound, and language converge. Here, belonging emerges as something fragile and active, formed through transmission, inheritance, and acts of remembrance. Julianknxx approaches storytelling as a space of encounter, where personal testimony becomes a way to reflect on broader questions of identity and continuity.

In Search of Incredible highlights Julianknxx’s distinctive ability to create works of deep emotional and formal intensity. His practice expands how stories can be told and experienced, affirming his position as one of the most compelling voices of his generation. The exhibition reflects LUMA Arles’s ongoing commitment to supporting artists who challenge and renew our understanding of image, history, and the politics of voice.

Environmental History V

The symposium Environmental History investigates the interactions between humans and the “natural world,” focusing on how non-human entities and multispecies ecologies can transform the understanding of agency in historical and contemporary narratives.

For its fifth edition, the symposium will interrogate the relationship between myth-making and historiography, through the concept of “Mythological Machines”. Speakers will include: Norman Ajari, Julien d’Huy, Wilfried N’Sondé, Josèfa Ntjam, Verena Paravel, Naomi Rincón-Gallardo and many others.