Lët’z Arles – 2021
Daniel Reuter

Exhibition: 4 July – 26 September, 2021
The 52nd Rencontres d’Arles, Chapelle de la Charité

Book signing:
Daniel Reuter "Providencia"
Wednesday, 7 July 2021, 5pm
Librairie du Palais, Arles

Lët’z Arles is delighted to be participating for the 4th time in the Rencontres d’Arles this summer 2021, with two exhibitions displayed within the associated programme.

The two projects were selected by an international jury on the basis of an exhibition specially devised for the Chapelle de la Charité in Arles: Providencia, by Daniel Reuter, and ERRE, by Lisa Kohl.

The jury was composed of:
Paul di Felice, co-founder of Café-Crème and the European Month of Photography (EMOP), exhibition curator
Danielle Igniti, exhibition curator and former director of the Dudelange art centres
Marta Gili, director of the École nationale supérieure de la photographie d’Arles (ENSP)
Steph Meyers, director of Rotondes
Sam Stourdzé, former director of the Rencontres d’Arles and current director of the Villa Médicis (Rome)
Michèle Walerich, head of the Photography Department of the Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA), exhibition curator
Christoph Wiesner, former artistic director of Paris Photo and current director of the Rencontres d’Arles
Under the Presidency of Florence Reckinger-Taddeï, President of Lët’z Arles, without voting rights.

Daniel Reuter: "Providencia"
Providencia - providence - in its biblical sense, describes God's intervention in the universe, an influence beyond human control. The Providencia district in Santiago de Chile provides both the setting and the title for this new series by Daniel Reuter. His work explores the signs of a recently exposed divergence, starting from a visually prosaic urbanity: architectural details, makeshift structures, trees and foliage, construction site hoardings that obstruct the view. In the aftermath of civil unrest, we meet the protagonists, confined within the complexity of their existence. Beneath the surface layer of the quotidian, we sense the last great wave of Western aspiration crashing down. Figures appear, the reiteration of a narrator, or characters living within a fractured narrative? Resonating with his research topics, such as identity and memory, the artist draws on this charged topography and translates its textures, reflections and light. The investigation of a deeper and more internalised territory takes shape, conjuring up the dreams and disenchantment of a world in upheaval.

Daniel Reuter's work is a work that develops continuously. Not in small, isolated or selfcontained series, but as an exploration, which develops from his immediate daily environment, from distant journeys and from encounters. By travelling and observing the contemporary world, by exploring its similarities and paradoxes, the work develops from series to series over time and contexts.

While "Providencia" is a work that starts from a specific geographical location at a set time, it is subtly translated by Daniel Reuter's photographic approach. The study of its history, the observation of details extracted from its urban or natural daily life, the capture of its light, its reflections and its materialities, the inclusion of portraits of its inhabitants, the association of other narrators and viewpoints – such as that of the Chilean author Alejandro Zambra – enables the introduction of more mental kind of space, that goes beyond its referent.

By navigating the graduated spectrum between the real and the projected, the singular and the global, by privileging the periphery rather than the epicentre of events, he delivers an account of the world that appeals to us without ever enclosing it within a frozen discourse or directed positioning.

Aesthetically, it’s a work that I see as landscape photography, but that Daniel Reuter reappropriates depending on the project and the given context. While the photographic image remains central, its transposition into the space - both of the exhibition and the book - explores new forms and dimensions. In the Chapelle de la Charité, the images are exhibited on a hexagonal shape inspired by a modernist pavilion in the Providencia district, but continue to resonate with the present environment/exhibition space.
Michèle Walerich (curator)

Daniel Reuter was born in Germany in 1976. He lives and works between Luxembourg and Iceland.

Through abstraction and de-contextualisation, his work navigates the line between lived experience and fiction. His sequences of images play with the narrative form and challenge notions of place, often within the confines of the photo book.

His first book, History of the Visit, was published in 2013 by Peperoni Books (Berlin) and nominated for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First Photobook of the Year in 2013, and for the German Photobook Award 2015. A sequel entitled Circle Square was published by Roman Nvmerals in New York in 2017, followed by Beachhead in 2020. Reuter's work has been shown in Europe, Japan and the United States and is part of several public and private collections. In 2021, his work was shown in Luxembourg as part of the European Month of Photography (EMoP): solo exhibition Oversees at Nosbaum Reding Gallery, and presentation of his series Circle, Square within the Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art (MNHA)’s collective exhibition Rethinking Landscape.

More information: danielreuter.net