A Summer Art Road Trip Through the South of France
- LUMA Foundation, Arles
- Through January 10, 2026
Arles has long been one of France’s most important art cities, known for its world-leading photography festival, its newer and increasingly popular drawing fair and its Van Gogh museum. The city hosted and inspired the artist through some of his most productive months, from the period he spent working alongside Gauguin to the darker episodes that led to his hospitalization. The arrival of Maja Hoffmann’s LUMA Foundation, with Frank Gehry‘s 56-meter Tower and its spaceship-like metallic façade conceived in dialogue with the rocky forms of the nearby Alpilles, further reinforced Arles’s position as an unmissable destination for art lovers traveling through the region. Occupying the seven-hectare Parc des Ateliers, LUMA operates less like a conventional museum than an “interdisciplinary creative campus” hosting ambitious temporary exhibitions, permanent installations, performances, archives, residencies and research projects. At its core is the aim of offering artists and thinkers a space in which to develop work across culture, ecology, human rights and technological and social change. That proposition is reflected in its dense summer program, spanning film, photography, sound and publishing. One of the season’s key exhibitions is Saodat Ismailova‘s “Amanat, The Sacred Forest,” in which the Uzbek artist and filmmaker explores Central Asia’s spiritual and cultural histories through myth, ritual and oral tradition, centered on a recently commissioned film set in Arslanbob, one of the world’s largest walnut forests, in southern Kyrgyzstan. Stan Douglas presents “Bodies Never Lie,” a newly commissioned multi-channel video installation structured as an Exquisite Corpse and set in Francoist Spain in the 1950s, examining flamenco as a coded language of identity, censorship and resistance. Camille Henrot presents her film In the Veins, while Patti Smith joins Soundwalk Collective in transforming field recordings, moving images and poetry into the immersive installation “CORRESPONDENCES.” Elsewhere, Gerhard Richter‘s “Overpainted Photographs” continues his investigation into representation, hovering between performance and documentation. Additional highlights include the Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents, Offprint Arles and multimedia projects by Verena Paravel and Julianknxx. The latter, a fast-rising figure in the French art scene, presents “In Search of… Incredible,” a multimedia work developed during his residency at LUMA Arles.
