Arles: Young guns on show at Arles’ Voies Off fringe festival

Running during Les Rencontres d’Arles and with an opening week all of its own, Voies Off is a well-established, free, fringe festival. Featuring exhibitions, evening projections, portfolio reviews, and parties – this year sound-tracked by the Africa Fete Festival – it’s the place to discover and be discovered.

Based in the Cour de l’Archevêché in the centre of Arles but with exhibitions running all over town, Voies Off is sponsored by Leica and is screening the 2018 Leica Oskar Barnack Award finalists every night this week except Wednesday. But it also has a well-defined programme of their own, which this year includes an exhibition titled If Slovenia Were… curated by the respected Slovenian/French photographer Klavdij Sluban and featuring work by 19 contemporary Slovenian photographers.

Home, Ljubljana 2017 © Tereza Kozinc
Nest © Klemen Skubic

The Voies Off also has an annual prize for photographers, the Prix Voies Off, which this year includes 60 finalists from all over the world. Their images will be screened every night at the Cour de l’Archevêché, and the winner will be announced at the closing night awards ceremony, along with the winners of the SAIF Révélation Award, Lacritique.org Award, Spéos Photo Award, and Leica Galleries International Portfolio Awards.

https://voies-off.com/index.php/en/

© Anastasia Samoylova, USA
© Ayline Olukman, France
© Elsa Stubbe, Belgium
© Diane Moulenc, France
© Filippo Venturi, Italy
© Gloria Oyarzabal, Spain
© Guillaume Hebert, Taiwan
© Jaakko Kahilaniemi, Finland
© Janek Stroisch, Germany
© Kristin-Lee Moolman, South Africa
© Laurence Kubski, Switzerland
© Lucie Khahoutian, Georgia
© Marie Gomis-Trezise, Galerie Number 8, Belgium,  Samia Ziadi
“Glass cow” Heidi in the lecture hall at the Free University of Berlin, Faculty of Anatomy. It is the only transparent model of a cow with a BSE upgrade and without glass cover. March 2017 © Nikita Teryoshin, Germany
© Nina Röder, Germany
© Quentin Lacombe, Switzerland
© Roger Grasas, Spain
© Samir Tlatli, France
August 18, 2017 – Shiraz, Iran. A cutout of an Iranian woman in front of Karim Khan Palace, Shiraz. © Simone Tramonte, Italy
Diane Smyth

Diane Smyth is the editor of BJP, returning for a second stint on staff in 2023 - after 15 years on the team until 2019. As a freelancer, she has written for The Guardian, FT Weekend Magazine, Creative Review, Aperture, FOAM, Aesthetica and Apollo. She has also curated exhibitions for institutions such as The Photographers Gallery and Lianzhou Foto Festival. You can follow her on instagram @dismy