Speakers:

Diane Dufour
Co-founder and co-director of LE BAL in Paris, Diane Dufour is a leading figure in contemporary photography and visual culture. She also directs the series Les Carnets du BAL, a dialogue between artists and scholars reflecting on today’s visual society. She is currently presenting the exhibition We Others (20 June – 16 November 2025) at LE BAL, and in September she will take part in the Festival des Sciences Sociales in Marseillewith a talk on “Images in Information.”

Florian Ebner
Art historian and director of the Photography Department at the Centre Pompidou, Florian Ebner explores the dialogue between photography and contemporary art. He is currently curator of Wolfgang Tillmans’s exhibition, on view at the Centre Pompidou until 22 September 2025.

Sigmar Polke, Paris, 1971
Collection Hesta AG

Presentation of the speakers:

François Halard
This photographer lives between Arles and New York. Exploring the intimate world of artists through their living and creative spaces, he has devoted numerous portraits to major figures such as Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Miró and Miquel Barceló.

Christoph Wiesner
Director of Rencontres d’Arles since 2020, he previously orchestrated the programming of Paris Photo after starting his career at the Esther Schipper gallery in Berlin and running the Yvon Lambert gallery in Paris. His work aims to renew the photographic scene by incorporating contemporary issues such as ecology, feminism and postcolonial studies.

Vue de l’exposition : Sigmar Polke
Paris 1971, 1971
Sélection de 30 tirages gélatino-argentiques uniques issus d’un ensemble de 41, 23,5 × 17,8 cm chaque
Collection Hesta AG, Suisse

In the first part of the evening, Jean de Loisy, co-curator of the exhibition, will give the floor to Raymond Martinez, photographer, great admirer and commentator of Van Gogh’s work. He will be followed by Arnauld Pierre, author, critic, art historian and professor of the History of Contemporary Art at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne, and author of the book Maternités cosmiques, La recherche des origines, de Kupka à Kubrick aux Éditions Hazan (2010).

This double encounter will be followed by a musical reading of letters by Vincent van Gogh on the theme of Night, imagined and orchestrated by Marie Vauzelle.t

Lettre de Van Gogh à Eugène Boch. Arles, mardi 2 octobre 1888.
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
(Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Duration: 45 minutes
Original version: English
French subtitles: click on the (CC) button to activate

with:

Jean de Loisy, Director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris
Bice Curiger et Julia Marchand, Exhibition curators
Antonio Mariotti, President of the Archivo Donetta
Rose Lowder, artist
Sylvain Prudhomme, writer
Natsuko Uchino, artist
Marie Varenne, Farmer and florist

For each interview, the Foundation produced a short version of about 5 minutes, as well as a long version of about 12 minutes; all are available on the our Vimeo page.
The short version of each interview can be viewed below:

Conception : Sophie Viguier, Clémence Despois, Sara Guti  and Justine Tallon (service pédagogique / educational programmes) with Anne-Sophie Foron based on an original idea by Bice Curiger
Direction and editing : Anne-Sophie Foron, Léo Pouliquen and Hugo Pouliquen
Coordination : Anne-Sophie Foron and Sophie Viguier
Camera : Léo Pouliquen with Thomas Reiser-Carles and Hugo Pouliquen
Translation : Laurel Saint-Pierre
Music : Die Polstergruppe, extracts from the concert held at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles in July 2016
Production : Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles
Courtesy : www.archiviodonetta.ch ; Cyprien Gaillard, Natsuko Uchino ; Light Cone (Paris) & Rose Lowder ; Léo Pouliquen

Rose Lowder
Bouquets 1-10, 1994-1995, 16 mm numérisé en HD, couleur, silencieux
1 min. (chaque)
Copyright : Light Cone (Paris) & Rose Lowder

Wednesday 15 July at 9.30pm

In addition to the “La Complicité” exhibition, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles is hosting an evening of screening and discussion around 16mm films by Rose Lowder, experimental filmmaker and co-founder of the Avignon Experimental Film Archives.

>> Free Entry

Rose Lowder will speak here with Vincent Sorrel, teacher-researcher at Grenoble-Alpes University, about some of the films presented in the exhibition, including Les Tournesols (1982-1983) and Voiliers et Coquelicots (2001), but also about other films, such as Fleur de Sel (2010) which explores the cinematographic possibilities of the Guérande salt

Vincent Sorrel, filmmaker and teacher-researcher at the University of Grenoble-Alpes, considers cinematographic practices based on the aesthetic and poetic questions posed by tools to filmmakers. He studied the design of the Bolex camera, used in particular by Rose Lowder, from the manufacturer’s archives as part of research conducted by the University of Lausanne.

Screening:
Les Tournesols (1982-1983), 16 mm, color, silent, 6 min
Bouquets 1-10 (1994-1995), 16 mm, ccolor, silent, 10 min
Voiliers et Coquelicots (2001), 16 mm, color, silent, 2 min
Habitat batracien (2006), 16 mm, color, silent, 8’31 min
Fleur de sel (2010), 16 mm, color, sound, 32 min

Rose Lowder

Rose Lowder is an experimental filmmaker working in Avignon. She was born in 1941 in Lima and studied fine arts from a young age. She lived in Peru until the late 1950s, taking the opportunity to travel the country extensively at a time when it was still little exposed to international tourism.

After continuing her training in London at the Regent Street Polytechnic and the Chelsea School of Art, between 1964 and 1972 Lowder worked as an editor in the film industry. During her years in London she frequented the independent bookshop Better Books and discovered the work of experimental filmmakers associated with Structural film, such as Malcolm Le Grice and Robert Breer.

Motivated by the desire to build up a collection of films that lay outside the mainstream, and taking her cue from the screening and programming venues created in the early 1970s in the wake of the Anthology Film Archives in New York, Rose Lowder co-founded AFEA (Archives du film expérimental d’Avignon), which today houses nearly two hundred films in 16 mm format as well as paper documents.

Her own practice as an experimental filmmaker flourished as from the late 1970s. Focusing her research on visual perception, which she studied for three years, Rose Lowder constructs her images from the possibilities offered by the film stock and the environment in which she is filming.

Her investigations have led her to work frame by frame with her Bolex camera and to eliminate all post-production editing, as she creates her tapestries of images by passing the film through the camera several times. Lowder gradually developed her own tracking system – a sort of drawn and illustrated score that allows her to identify, while filming, the photograms still available for the creation of new compositions.

Rose Lowder films what she sees, with the goal of transcribing the reality of carefully chosen environments. These are often organic farms and gardens of special interest, which testify to an ecological awareness. Conversely, however, they may be industrialised spaces –notably in Quiproquo (1992), which was shot in Fos-sur-Mer at the mouth of the Rhône. All these places reflect a committed film-making practice situated in a specific locality.

Today the Rose Lowder’s work is distributed by the experimental film distributor Light Cone and has been shown at home and abroad, including most recently in France in group exhibitions at the Villa Vassilieff (2017) and the FRAC Normandie Rouen (2019). Her first series of Bouquets (Bouquets 1–10, 1994–1995), each film one minute long, is now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou.

Biographies of the speakers

Joseph Ponthus, born in 1978, lives and works in Brittany. After studying literature in Reims and social work in Nancy, he worked for more than ten years as a specialist educator in the suburbs of Paris, where he directed and published Nous… la Cité (Éditions Zones, 2012).

His first novel, À la ligne, was published in January 2019. It was awarded the Grand Prix RTL/Lire, the Prix Régine Deforges, the Prix Jean Amila-Meckert, the Prix du Premier Roman des lecteurs des bibliothèques de la Ville de Paris, and the Prix Eugène Dabit du Roman populiste.

Sylvain Prudhomme, born in 1979, is a novelist. The majority of his novels are published in Gallimard’s “L’arbalète” collection. His recent books include Là, avait dit Bahi (Prix Louis Guilloux, 2012), Les Grands (voted winner of the “Révélation française” category by the magazine Lire in 2014, winner of the Prix Porte Dorée, 2015), and Légende (Prix François Billetdoux, 2016), which is set in 1980s Arles and the neighbouring Crau region. His latest novel, Par les routes, was awarded the 2019 Prix Femina.

A leading figure on the international art scene, Bice Curiger brings her wealth of experience to the conception and realisation, at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, of a dynamic program, which explores the resonances between original works by Vincent van Gogh and those of contemporary artists. Art historian and art critic, Bice Curiger was curator at the Zurich Kunsthaus for twenty years and in 2011 curated the 54th Venice Biennale.

Within the framework of the partnership between the Musée Angladon – Collection Jacques Doucet and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, David Hockney’s Vincent’s Chair and Pipe (1988) is currently on show at the Museum Angladon. The painting, on loan from Arles, can be seen until 28 October. In exchange, Van Gogh’s Railway Carriages (1888), which belongs to the Museum Angladon’s collections, is on loan to the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles for its exhibition Hot Sun, Late Sun. Modernism Untamed.

Portrait of Bice Curiger.
Photo : Gaetan Bally