ARLES.- In 1937, the Nazi regime presented the exhibition Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”).

The term was used to designate what was to be rejected: impure forms, resistant imaginaries, artists who escaped the established aesthetic and political order.

Nearly a century later, the word has lost none of its violence. It continues to circulate, sometimes under different names. Every era invents its own categories, exclusions, and norms of visibility. Every era decides which images are reassuring and which are disturbing. Dark periods rarely begin with book burnings. They begin with the classification of bodies, narratives, and images.

We are living in a time when simplification is increasingly presented as desirable. Identities harden, narratives close in on themselves, nuance becomes suspect, lines become straight, and the organic gives way to the rigidity of norms. Algorithms privilege what already resembles what we know. Doubt becomes a flaw; complexity, an obstacle.

From this feeling, Nicolas Havette launched an open call under the title (DE)GENERATE(D). Not to reenact a familiar history, but to question what a degenerate photograph might be today. A photograph that refuses to behave. A photograph that exceeds its frame, contaminates categories, and unsettles certainties.

Nearly twenty artists were selected for the singularity of their practice and the relevance with which they address contemporary transformations. All agreed to gather under this deliberately provocative banner, aware that some words deserve to be turned against their own history.

What unites these artists is neither a common aesthetic nor a shared generation. Their practices are sometimes contradictory. They employ archives, documentary approaches, fiction, collage, installation, vernacular imagery, artificial intelligence, and a wide range of photographic processes.

Yet all share the same distrust of overly simple narratives.

Here, curating becomes an act of assemblage. The works are not brought together to illustrate a theme, but to generate gaps, frictions, and collisions. Presented as a vast contemporary cabinet of curiosities, the images respond to one another, sometimes contradict one another, and often contaminate one another.

This free exhibition is presented as part of the Festival OFF Arles.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS

Pepe Atocha, Roger Ballen, Jacques Bastide, Zoé Borie, Jean-Christian Bourcart, Francesco Canova, Myriam Chastagnier, Denis Darzacq, Frédérique Daubal, Léa Devenelle, Frédéric Fornini, Isabelle Ha Eav, Jordan Horion, Chia Huang, Françoise Lambert, Marthe Lazarus, Stephane Lenthal, Adrien Limousin, Clara Montrieul, Matthias Olmeta, Ayline Olukman, Fabienne Paradeis, Lilie Pinot, Marion Pons, Adeline Praud, Bruno Privat, Kaëlis Robert, Valia Russo, Myriam Santos, Neckel Scholtus, Vladimir Seleznev, Luc Texier, Lou Thiebaut and Isabelle Vaillant.