BMW Group France, Major Partner of Les Rencontres d’Arles since 2010, presents the exhibition INSOLARE, by artist Eva Nielsen and curator Marianne Derrien, the winning duo of the BMW ART MAKERS, a partnership program dedicated to the visual arts.

• BMW Group France, patron of Les Rencontres d’Arles for the 14th year, is providing the Festival with a fleet of electrified BMW cars to transport guests, artists and curators.
• INSOLARE, by Eva Nielsen and Marianne Derrien, was created as part of the BMW ART MAKERS program and developed with Les Rencontres d’Arles, where it will be shown for the first time, before being exhibited at Paris Photo in November 2023.
• The BMW ART MAKERS program, created by BMW Group France, supports a duo each year in the creation of a joint project focusing on innovation and the visual arts and offers a grant of 10,000 euros to the artist, 8,000 euros to the curator, and a budget of 15,000 euros for the research and production of the works as well as the production of the exhibitions.
• BMW is also committed to promoting female talent by supporting the Prix de la Photo Madame Figaro Arles since its inception.

The INSOLARE project is a new experiment carried out as part of the BMW ART MAKERS. It is the result of a collaboration between Eva Nielsen and Marianne Derrien, and was designed especially for Les Rencontres d’Arles and Paris Photo. Their approach, which is both poetic and scientific, questions time and the sedimentation of the urban and Camargue landscape. They evoke the environmental changes that are leading to the disappearance of certain urban, industrial and natural landscapes, where the human footprint is always in question.

The artist Eva Nielsen has taken up the subject of geographical and geological change, a subject that few women have echoed.  The BMW ART MAKERS winner has made several trips to the Camargue, where she has taken hundreds of photographs. She combines her observation of climatic and geological phenomena with a technical gesture, that of exposure, particularly used in screen printing. The different materials and media used by the artist - photography, silk-screening, painting and printing - are superimposed and hybridised, resulting in a form of transfiguration. Like a topographer, Franco-Danish artist Eva Nielsen defines her work as a ’state of awareness’ of the reality of a territory, its architecture and its environment. With INSOLARE, the works change, like the urban and industrial landscape of the Camargue.

Marianne Derrien, curator, explains that “with INSOLARE, Eva Nielsen takes optical and hydro-geological phenomena and combines them with a technical gesture, that of exposure, used in particular in screen-printing. A spectrum of both rural and industrial reality, this project crosses the artist’s trajectories with those of the territories at the gateway to Arles, where the Camargue begins. This vast triangular island formed by the Gulf of Lion and the bifurcation of the Rhône called "They" becomes a field of experimentation. Faced with̀ the intensitý of natural phenomena and forces, between drought and rising waters, living areas circulate and migrate in Eva Nielsen’s works through superimpositions of screen-printed images and paintings offering a fragmented vision of these territories.  Blurring the boundaries between media, practices and motifs, INSOLARE brings to life the sedimentation of the Camargue’s solar and liquid landscapes.”

Christoph Wiesner, Director of the Rencontres d’Arles, explains that "the exhibition is part of the ’Geographies of the Gaze’ section of the 54th Rencontres d’Arles. Alongside other artists whose work reveals a state of awareness of the reality of climate and ecological upheaval, Eva Nielsen takes us on a journey through the Camargue region, where geography meets the traces of a contemporary history rich in its past, in a sensitive and original approach at the crossroads of different practices".

A scenography designed specifically to respond to ecological and heritage preservation issues. With the environment in mind, the scenography has been designed to ensure that materials are produced and used as sparingly as possible.  Suspended metal structures have replaced the traditional picture rails, and will be reused at Paris Photo in November 2023.

The Cloître Saint-Trophime has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1981, as one of the Roman and Romanesque monuments of Arles. The system created by Marianne Derrien and Eva Nielsen respects the constraints of this unique and historic exhibition space. Between the vaults and the works, they created a gra¬phic and geometric interplay of resonance and repetition, while addressing the issue of seriality from both a technical and aesthetic point of view.

BMW Group cultural engagement is based on long term partnerships with hundreds of projects internationally for more than 50 years now.  Since 2022, BMW Group has also been an official partner of the Cannes Film Festival and Paris + by Art Basel.

The BMW ART MAKERS 2023 Jury was composed of :

• Florence Bourgeois, Director of Paris Photo,
• Fabrice Bousteau, Editorial Director of Beaux-Arts Magazine,
• Hervé Digne, Chairman of Manifesto,
• Fannie Escoulen, Delegate for Photography at the French Ministry of Culture
• Chantal Nedjib, Founder of l’Image par l’image,
• Christophe Ono-dit-Biot, writer, Deputy Editorial Director of Le Point.
• Christoph Wiesner, Director of Rencontres d’Arles,
• Maryse Bataillard, Head of Corporate Communications and CSR BMW Group France