LUMA Arles
LUMA Arles is an interdisciplinary creative campus where, through exhibitions, conferences, live performances, architecture and design, thinkers, artists, researchers, and scientists question the relationships between art, culture, environment, human rights, and research. The cultural center is located on the Parc des Ateliers, a former railway wasteland covering 11 hectares. The landscape garden, park, and pond surrounding the campus are the work of landscape architect Bas Smets.
LUMA Arles is an interdisciplinary creative campus where, through exhibitions, conferences, live performances, architecture and design, thinkers, artists, researchers, and scientists question the relationships between art, culture, environment, human rights, and research. The cultural center is located on the Parc des Ateliers, a former railway wasteland covering 11 hectares. The landscape garden, park, and pond surrounding the campus are the work of landscape architect Bas Smets.
Programme
Living Landscape, DRIFT
Venue: Parc des Ateliers
This 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.
Practical Effects, Diana Thater
Venue: La Tour, Glassroom, Niveau -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.
A LOT OF PEOPLE, Rirkrit Tiravanija
Venue: 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. This exhibition 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.
The Life of Sculptures, Erika Verzutti
Venue: La Tour, Galerie Est, Niveau 0
Erika Verzutti (1971) is a Brazilian sculptor who lives and works between São Paulo and Europe. Verzutti will be in residency at LUMA Arles from May through July 2024. The residency provides a platform for Verzutti to produce a significant body of new work, present an exhibition, entitled The Life of Sculptures, and develop an ongoing film project that will be shot in Arles. Verzutti’s multifarious practice as a sculptor encompasses organic, human, and animal forms, references to Modern and Modernist art, citations of Brazilian art and architecture, and a playful suggestiveness bordering on eroticism.
Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coen
Venue: La Tour, Galerie des Archives, Niveau -2
An exhibition born of the collaboration between the great American photographer and the celebrated film director. Spanning 60 years of Friedlander’s career through 70 prints and a film, Joel Coen’s curation highlights the photographer’s singular approach to composition and reveals an unexpected affinity between the two artists: their continual fascination with the sly power of images, explored through splintered framings, misleading compositions, and fractured and repeated elements. A veritable cinematic experience, the exhibition unfolds the images like a sequence of mini-narratives, each strange and anonymous.
Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives – Chapter 4 : Gustav Metzger – All of Us Together
Venue: La Tour, Galerie du Cerisier, Niveau -2 et Underground -3
For its fourth chapter, the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives at LUMA Arles presents an exploration of the work of Gustav Metzger (born 10 April 1926 in Nuremberg, passed away on 1 March 2017 in London), an essential figure for ecology and activism in the arts. Drawing upon a two-decade-long friendship between Metzger and Obrist, the exhibition unfolds over two levels, providing both an immersion into never-before-seen archives and a panorama of the artist’s most iconic works, the pertinence of which is ever more urgent.
Je n’attends plus, William Kentridge
Venue: La Mécanique Générale, Face Nord
William Kentridge is one of the most multi-faceted artists of his generation. Combining drawing, film, sculpture, theater, and opera, he is renowned for his politically engaged practice. In conjunction with the world premiere of his newly commissioned opera The Great Yes, The Great No, which will debut at LUMA Arles this summer, the exhibition Je n’attends plus (I’m Not Waiting Any Longer) presents a group of major works, some of which have not been seen in Europe before. Dealing with issues of migration, oppression, racial relations, the transmission of history, and the role of the artist in a society under duress, the exhibition brings together a remarkable body of experimental and performative work.
Le chant du centre, Theaster Gates
Venue: La Grande Halle, Est
A new artistic concept presented in collaboration with Theaster Gates as part of its long-term engagement with the celebrated artist. Gates will honor the lineage of his artistic origins as a potter and extend this speculative proposal by converting LUMA Arles’s La Grande Halle into a site of experimental ceramic production. Continuing the artist’s investment in the craft traditions of the Japanese Mingei movement, Gates will invite visitors to observe the performance and process of making, deepening our collective appreciation for the ancient and contemporary significance of clay as a medium.
Herstory, Judy Chicago
Lieu : Le Magasin Électrique, Bloc A
Premiered at the New Museum, New York in 2023, this exhibition was the iconic feminist artist’s most comprehensive New York museum survey to date. LUMA Arles will host her as a reconceived and expanded exhibition, building on the success of the New Museum show. Spanning more than sixty years of the artist’s career for the most expansive exhibition of her work in Europe to date, Herstory traces Chicago’s practice from her early experiments in Minimalism in the 1960s and her revolutionary feminist art of the 1970s to her series of the 1980s and 1990s.
Access
LUMA Arles
Parc des Ateliers
35, avenue Victor-Hugo
13200 Arles
luma-arles.org
Open from Wednesday to Monday from 10 am to 6 pm.
Locate other art venues in the vicinity on the map.
Discover our address book
PLACES TO DISCOVER
• L’Aire, petit centre d’art : restaurant and art gallery (artistic director Cyrille Putman).
• La Croisière : ephemeral space in the heart of Arles with restaurant, juice bar, open-air cinema, bookstore, grocery store, exhibitions, yoga classes, petanque field, music, well-being...
• Musée Reattu : museum created around the artworks of the Arles painter Jacques Réattu and a collection of drawings by Picasso; the place is also devoted to photography and architecture.
• Georges Selz : antique stores.
• Maison Fragonard : the famous perfumer from Grasse has chosen to set up shop just a stone's throw from the famous Roman amphitheater and the ancient theater.
PLACES TO STAY
• L’Arlatan : the place to be in Arles! A total work of art by Jorge Pardo. A colourful universe to sleep in, eat or enjoy a cocktail.
• Le Cloître : a place designed by India Mahdavi. Located on a small place in the heart of Arles.
• Le Nord-Pinus : on its terrace, at the bar or in the bedrooms, this hotspot of the Arlesian life welcomed Hemingway, Cocteau, Picasso, Inès de la Fressange or Kate Moss.
PLACES TO EAT
• La Chassagnette : a tribute to the richness of the vegetables combined with local producers’ meat and fish by Chef Armand Arnal. One Michelin star.
• Le Chardon : this living space welcomes Chefs in residence.
• Bazar Café : coffee shop, brunch, healthy, tasty, organic and seasonal cuisine.
• Infini Café : organic coffee beans, hot chocolate prepared with chocolate pieces and homemade cakes.
• Le Tambourin : traditional and Provençal cuisine to enjoy on a terrace, under the majestic plane trees of the Place du Forum.
• Monstre : gallery, café, restaurant, olive oil, salt, pepper.
• Le Gibolin : bistrot, wine bar and organic cuisine in the uncommon district of la Roquette.
• Le Galoubet : refined recipes to enjoy on a beautiful terrace, in the heart of the old town.
• Mon Bar : orovençal specialties, brasserie meals and Creole recipes. A must-go terrace.
• Restaurant-Hôtel Le Voltaire : a 5-minute walk from the train station, in the old centre, near the Rhône docks, at the foot of the Arenas.
