Alice Pallot / Les Rencontres d'Arles

Five Contemporary photography offers a stimulating reinterpretation of the floral theme. Far from being a simple ornamental motif, flowers have become a way of exploring life and experimenting with the image. Presented in the Jardin d’Été, works by five international artists show how flowers continue to resonate in contemporary practice.

Framed by ecological, political and historical concerns, images of flowers take on a different tone. What may at first appear as an exploration of form and colour often carries an activist undercurrent. Through metaphor or more direct forms of representation, these works engage their subject while testing the possibilities of the image.

For Alice Pallot and Anaïs Tondeur, working with life goes hand in hand with experimentation in photography, often in environments that seem inhospitable to growth. Yet even in landscapes shaped by extractivism, pollution and radioactive damage, what anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls a “third nature” becomes the ground from which unexpected forms of life emerge.

If a “language of flowers” still exists, it no longer speaks in the register of conventional sentiment. Jiang Zhi’s burning flowers carry the memory of a love ritual. Matei Bejenaru works with scientific instruments used to observe life, blurring the boundary between truth and fiction. Suzanne Lafont brings “companion plants” into urban spaces, making overlooked flowers visible along our paths and countering “plant blindness,” our cultural indifference to plant life.

What better place than a garden to express this need for reconciliation?

Beata Nowak and Michel Poivert