The artist Mustapha Azeroual and the curator Marjolaine Lévy have been chosen by the jury for their project The Green Ray, which will be presented at the Rencontres d’Arles in summer 2024, then at Paris Photo, of which BMW is official partner, in November 2024.


The Project: The Green Ray
The Green Ray addresses the poetics of light and makes the invisible visible.
Mustapha Azeroual records the light of the sun at dawn and sunset, capturing a palette of colors corresponding to the territory in which he takes his photographs. This optical experiment produces abstract images.
For BMW ART MAKERS, Mustapha Azeroual will experiment with photographing the sun on the open sea, a setting he had never before explored. To limit travel, the duo will create a community of sailors, scientists, and artists. Each group will have a precise photographic protocol to follow.
The Green Ray seeks to demonstrate the possibility of a different kind of abstraction is possible, speaking to the issues and problematics of our society, as the color of the sky fluctuates in specific reaction to human activity.
An immersive and eco-responsible scenography will be designed for reuse and adaptation on other sites.

 
Within the framework of its call for applications, BMW ART MAKERS brings together and sponsors a duo, consisting of an emerging visual artist and a curator, to co-create a project.
The duo will begin its work in February and the project will be presented at the Rencontres d’Arles in summer 2024, then at Paris Photo in November 2024.
BMW Group France gives a grant of 10,000 euros to the artist, a grant of 8,000 euros to the curator, and a research and production budget of 15,000 euros, followed by the production of a solo show at the Rencontres d’Arles and Paris Photo 2024, of which BMW is official partner.

 
The jury consisted of Florence Bourgeois, director, Paris Photo; Hervé Digne, president, Poush-Manifesto; Chantal Nedjib, founder, L’image par l’image; Christoph Wiesner, director, Rencontres d’Arles; Fannie Escoulen, head, Department of Photography, French Ministry of Culture; Pascal Beausse, Director of Collections, Centre National de la Photographie, art critic and exhibition curator; Christophe Ono-dit-Biot, writer, deputy editor, Le Point; and Maryse Bataillard, manager, corporate communications and enterprise social network, BMW Group France.
This artistic project is a new experiment, the product of their collaboration, which will culminate in a unique exhibition shown in the context of BMW’s long-term partnerships with the Rencontres d’Arles and Paris Photo.


ABOUT MUSTAPHA AZEROUAL
Mustapha Azeroual (1979, Franco-Moroccan) is a self-taught photographer who graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris Cergy in 2021 with the congratulations of the jury (Validation des Acquis de l’Expérience). Trained as a scientist, he based his studies on the observation of the processes of image emergence and his experimentation in photographic media. Combining installation, volume, and sequence with antique photographic processes, he updates historical techniques of shooting and developing photographs, while opening the scope of investigation of the photographic image beyond its presupposed limits (bidimensionality and temporality). At the heart of his creative process lies the question of the photographic aspects and materiality of the image. Mustapha Azeroual has been represented by the Galerie Binome (Paris) since 2013 and MCC Gallery (Marrakesh) since 2020.

 
ABOUT MARJOLAINE LÉVY
Marjolaine Lévy received her PhD in contemporary art history from the Université Paris-Sorbonne. She is an art critic and professor of art history at the Ecole Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne (Rennes). She is the author, among many essays and exhibition catalogs, of Les Modernologues (2017). She edited the books 20 ans d’art en France (Flammarion, 2018) and Jozef Halas (Skira, 2023). 

She is also an exhibition curator, notably of Histoires d’abstraction: le cauchemar de Greenberg at the Fondation Ricard (Paris) in 2021, Léon Wuidar, une peinture à géométrie variable at the Bonisson Art Center (Rognes, France), and the Fausta Squatriti retrospective at the Kunsthaus Pasquart (Biel, Switzerland) in 2023. In 2024, she will curate the exhibition La société des spectacles at the Fondation Rocard, the exhibition Delphine Coindet: Faire, défaire, refaire at the Galerie Laurent Godin, and the curatorial project Le jour et la nuit: pour une histoire de l’art suisse à deux voies at the Villa Dutoit (Geneva).