2024 program: From June, 1

Living Landscape
DRIFT
The Tower, Main Gallery, Level -2

In May 2024, LUMA Arles presents DRIFT, with a unique interactive exhibition and a newly commissioned performance. The collaboration with DRIFT is conceived as an extension to the ambitious group show staged at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, Van Gogh and the Stars. With this double commission, LUMA Arles will shed new light on the transformative nature of Vincent van Gogh’s practice and the ways in which he paved new artistic paths for future generations. Under the title of Living Landscape, the exhibition of the Amsterdam-based multidisciplinary artists will bring together two of their most innovate and immersive interactive artworks, Coded Nature and Murmuring Minds. Displayed together, the two artworks will create a new and never before seen installation as part of this commission. The installation employs powerful technological tools to create a unique environment that addresses the experience of human and machine senses and phenomena. Living Landscape is concerned with relationality, movement in understanding the visible and the invisible nature that surrounds us, and the role that the different elements in nature play in relation to each other. Notions that were also central to Van Gogh’s painterly explorations and experiments and can be vividly seen in his canvases. DRIFT aims to reveal the structures and patterns in nature and have audiences experience these in an interactive way.

Electric Sky
DRIFT
Performance
Parc des Ateliers

A unique outdoor performance using drones will be the highlight of the opening of the exhibition. Titled Electric Sky, the performance will use cutting-edge technologies to create remarkable visuals in the evening sky above Arles, creating images unbound by gravity while referencing the light and textures that mark the unique conditions of Arles, its reality and essence, qualities that have inspired artistic production across history. The unique performance will enhance the significance of the exhibitions at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh and at LUMA Arles.

The parallel exhibitions at LUMA Arles and at Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles will be a rare chance to experience some of the most significant artworks of unique historical importance made possible by unprecedented loans from some of the world’s greatest museums and private collections. Together with the multi-sensory commission and performance of DRIFT the exhibitions will showcase the major transformations that art can create, establishing the connections between the extraordinary talent of Vincent van Gogh and the spirit that characterizes the most advanced experimental attitudes of today.

Practical Effects
Diana Thater
The Tower, Glassroom, Level -2

Approaching the idea of post-apocalyptic life through a poignant and wistful lens, Practical Effects follows a primate-like biomimetic robot who, as the last being left on Earth, has been tasked with the care and upkeep of a garden filled with intricately sculpted topiary animals. Devoid of human, animal, or mechanical contact, the colorful but weather-worn robot can only find companionship in the manicured topiary figures it cares for, putting forth a strange and tragicomic vision of how the organic and inorganic worlds might eventually collide and support one another in unexpected ways.

The title of the artwork Practical Effects refers to the cinematic art of creating analog special effects without the use of digital enhancements or other post-production techniques. Thater drew inspiration from the 1972 cult science-fiction film Silent Running, which explored the idea of robots as gardeners and gathered critical praise for its unique use of costumes and practical effects to characterize these possibly sentient beings. In turn, Thater collaborated with notable Hollywood costume house Michael Schmidt Studios to design and build the robot in Practical Effects. Thater and Schmidt employed similar strategies in the design of their films’ mechanical protagonist, bringing a crucial, irreplicable sense of humanity and soulfulness to its movements and gestures.

A LOT OF PEOPLE
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Les Forges

From the start of his practice, a critical material for Rirkrit Tiravanija (Thai, b. 1961) has been the presence of “a lot of people”—a purposefully broad and expansive term that stands as an open invitation to everyone and anyone, present and future. Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE is conceived in partnership with MoMA PS1 where the exhibition premiered in 2023. It is a comprehensive survey of his work and one of the largest exhibitions of the artist to date in Europe. Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE traces four decades of the artist’s career and features over 100 works, from early experimentations with installation and film, to works on paper, photographs, ephemera, sculptures, and newly produced “plays” of key participatory pieces.

The exhibition brings together rarely seen early works from the late 1980s and 1990s, a period in which the artist was developing a post-studio practice and introducing biographical references to highlight his experiences as an immigrant with a palpable sense of “otherness” in a Western-centric art world. These works include many original sculptures, installations, and editions, some of which have been subsequently reimagined, cast, and memorialized over the years in new materials from plaster to bronze. Formative to his early practice, Tiravanija’s concern with the politics of the personal expanded into works that tackle global politics as well as the quotidian news cycle. To make many of these works, Tiravanija has set up a studio near his home in Chiang Mai, Thailand, creating an economy of art production that is explicitly localized and collaborative. Critical to the evolution of recent art worldwide, Tiravanija’s interdisciplinary practice has been transnational in scope, engaging notions of cultural difference, interrogating the parameters of place, and negotiating how people can come together.

"Rirkrit Tiravanija : A LOT OF PEOPLE" is organized in partnership with MoMA PS1, curatedy by Ruba Katrib, Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, MoMA PS1, and Yasmil Raymond, Rector, St.delschule and Director of Portikus, Frankfurt, with Jody Graf and Kari Rittenbach, Assistant Curators, MoMA PS1.

The exhibition at LUMA Arles is curated by Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Director of Exhibitions and Programs.