ARLES, Les rencontres de la photographie: THE CANNIBAL IMAGE

Camille Benarab-Lopez (1989), Lucile Boiron (1990), Mélissa Boucher Morales (1986), Eli Craven (1979), Orshi Drozdik (1946), Henriette Sabroe Ebbesen (1994), Aapo Huhta (1985), Dune Varela (1976)

Rather than treating photography as an interface between the external world and the viewer’s gaze, this exhibition considers it a body in its own right—one that expresses a visceral, almost bestial appetite for reality. Through photography, installations, video and sculpture, eight artists explore the cannibalistic nature of the image. Here the subjects are bitten, chewed and digested by the photographic process. Nude bodies, distorted in their fall, doubled or caught in reflective surfaces, demonstrate how photography becomes both reflection and devourer of its subject. The works, in turn, confront us with our status as voyeurs, the voracity of our gaze.

Throughout the exhibition, photography moves beyond its usual boundaries to occupy space, becoming both subject and sensory presence. The frame ceases to function as a limit and instead becomes an extension of the image’s body, revealing itself as living matter.

Photography becomes a form of incarnation, famished and elusive. The photographic surface becomes its flesh; the viewer’s gaze, reflected on the surface, its eyes; space, its mouth opening to devour everything that appears. In this sense, the images are “cannibal.”

The exhibition invites reflection on the ways in which the image, through the metaphorical ingestion of reality, feeds itself and takes form. As we wander through this space, we are confronted by visual fragments that, like the souls of Dante’s Inferno, attempt to draw us closer.

Alessandra Chiericato