Lët’z Arles – 2021
Lisa Kohl

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

Book signing:
Lisa Kohl "ERRE"
Thursday, 8 July 2021, 2pm
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.

Lisa Kohl: "ERRE"
Lisa Kohl is interested in the relationship between artistic creation and social reality. She goes into the field to meet people who live in precarious conditions and establishes relationships of exchange and trust with them. Lisa Kohl's works speak of flight, exile, the non-place of life or survival, invisibility and absence. With great daring, she succeeds in linking reality to poetry.

Her message is social. It involves protesting against a hostile and cold state while simultaneously allowing us, through the poetic aesthetics of images, to dream of a world in which everything could be different. It invites us to reflect on identity, homelands, the crossing of borders, futility and hope.

I am impressed by the poetic force of Lisa Kohl's work. Her works are of an insane beauty, which you wouldn’t expect in places such as no-man’s lands, borders, military camps and migrant shelters.

Her subjects are very serious and difficult to tackle without falling into clichés and voyeurism. But Lisa Kohl has a great deal of sensitivity and manages to show us a hard and difficult world by giving a voice and a presence to forgotten and invisible people. It’s a work that combines social engagement and aesthetic research in an admirable way. The artist leads the viewer to question the borders within his mind, to question his fear, and gently guides him towards listening and seeing others.
Danielle Igniti (Curator)

Lisa Kohl was born in 1988 in Luxembourg. She lives and works between Luxembourg and Germany.

Lisa Kohl trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre (Belgium) and at Burg Giebichenstein in Halle (Germany), from which she graduated with distinction in 2017. Her art takes various forms, such as collaborations with performing arts practitioners, photo series, sculptural installations and audiovisual performances.

In 2018, she was awarded the Saxony Anhalt Arts Foundation grant, leading to a residency at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. Her photographic work has won her many awards, including a nomination for the Edward Steichen Award (2019) and the Pierre Werner Prize and a participation at the Salon du Cercle Artistique de Luxembourg (CAL) in 2020. In 2021, her photographic series Land(e)scape (2015) was exhibited as a solo show at the Abbaye de Neumünster (Luxembourg), as part of the European Month of Photography (EMoP).

More information: www.lisa-kohl.com