Discovery Award 2024 Louis Roederer Foundation : François Bellabas, Jury Prize and Tshepiso Mazibuko, Public Prize at the Rencontres d’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. 

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 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.

The Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation associates all exhibition spaces. Through their work spotting new talent, galleries, art centres, community spaces, independent venues and institutions are often the first to support emerging artists. These structures can submit a project by an artist whose work deserves to be discovered by an international audience. The seven selected projects are considered as a collective exhibition, conceived, from the selection to the hanging, by the curator Audrey Illouz.

The exhibition 2024 the seven selected projects are considered as a collective exhibition, conceived, from the selection to the hanging, by the curator Audrey Illouz. The exhibition On the look-out stems from a diffuse but palpable sense of unease shared. It evokes a heightened awareness of the world, a physical and psychological state where the artist remains attentive to the troubles of our time without indulging in frontality. Faced with impending or ongoing disasters, alternative scenarios keep catastrophe at bay and outline new paths.

The award-winning photographs and finalists will be presented until 29 September 2024 at Espace Monoprix in Arles.