Four artists to watch from Les Rencontres d’Arles 2026

The annual photography festival held in Arles from July to October spans over 50 official exhibitions, dozens of off site shows, and a range of institutional collaborations. One of the pleasures of visiting the festival is the mix of established and emerging artists presented, from some of the biggest names in photography to artists at the start of their careers. Photographers from the African continent are particularly well represented in the 2026 edition, from solo shows to the impressive group exhibition GHANA!. Awards such as the Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award also play an important role in supporting emerging artists from around the world, with the winners exhibited during the Rencontres. Of the hundreds of artists exhibiting at this year’s edition, who should you keep an eye on? We recommend:

Thato Toeba

Thato Toeba, civilians I, 2025, collage, glass and wood. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town / Amsterdam. Photo: Mario Todeschini.

Thato Toeba (b. 1990, Maseru, Lesotho) is an artist, lawyer and researcher who works primarily with collage and photomontage. Their work challenges the objectivity of images, and documentary photography in particular, through processes of reconstruction and reconfiguration. In an interview with Autograph curator Bindi Vora, Toeba describes how they started making art during the pandemic when resources and access to outdoor spaces were extremely limited, and as a result began working with magazines. In Toeba’s solo exhibition in Arles, the first artworks presented are miniature collages inventively staged within empty iPhone boxes, demonstrating the importance of found material in their practice. The diminutive size of these works forces the viewer to really peer in and engage with what is present, what is absent, and how the photographic record might mislead us. Toeba explores these themes on a vast scale too, in a larger-than-life installation in which visitors confront layers upon layers of images. Leaving the exhibition, one has the overriding sense that for Toeba, photographs are not just a world-building tool but a world re-building tool. 

Thato Toeba’s solo exhibition, Anyone Can Be Lucifer, is on show at Salle Henri Comte.

Instgram: @thatotoeba

Phan Quang

Phan Quang, Re/cover No. 1, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2014, series Re/cover, 2013–2016. Courtesy of the artist and Gallerie Bao.

This year’s shortlist for the Louis Roederer award is a particularly strong cohort, with each receiving a presentation in one of the festival’s quirkiest venues: an empty supermarket warehouse, entered by passing through a mysterious plastic curtain manned by security guards in the women’s clothing department. Immediately eye-catching is the Re/Cover project by Phan Quang, an artist born in 1976 in Binh Dinh, Vietnam. A series of portraits, some featuring an individual, some of couples and some of entire families, are united by one distinctive feature: all the people are covered by a large, white veil. The effect is surreal and unsettling, while the juxtaposition of serious posing and the vast transparent sheet encompassing the sitters lends a touch of humour too. Quang is in fact exploring a little-known aspect of Vietnamese history: the fate of women who had children with Japanese soldiers who remained in Vietnam after World War II. These families may have suffered years of stigmatisation, but today they embody their own form of counter-narrative. Quang treats his sitters with delicacy and tenderness, capturing them in domestic spaces and through his lens, the symbol of the wedding veil in its exaggerated form becomes a protective layer. 

Phan Quang’s work is featured in the group exhibition 2026 Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation: The Best Possible Way to Tell the Truth… at Espace Monoprix.
Instagram: @troc.quang.75470

Postbox Ghana

Postbox Ghana in the group exhibition GHANA! Dreaming Independence 1957–1976  at Palais de l’Archevêché. Image credit MTotoe/ FLOLondon.

Postbox Ghana’s floor-to-ceiling installation of brightly coloured postcards portraying modernist architectural landmarks was a standout of the GHANA! group exhibition. Founded by Manuela Nebuloni, Courage Dzidula Kpodo and Nana Ofosu Adjei, the research collective has been gathering postcards from the post-independence era for over five years. These postcards trace the development of Ghana’s infrastructure and urban societies, while also rediscovering the important role of forgotten photographers who captured this changing environment in the 1950s and 1960s. By foregrounding architecture as a medium of self-expression, Postbox Ghana opens up a conversation about the role of the built environment in forming cultural identity. Simultaneously, postcards are elevated to both historical documents and visual arts. 

Postbox Ghana’s work is featured in the group exhibition GHANA! Dreaming Independence 1957–1976  at the Palais de l’Archevêché.

Instagram: @postbox.ghana

Hu Weiyi

Hu Weiyi, Qilian Mountains No. 1, 2023, series Erosion, 2021–ongoing

Hu Weiyi, winner of the Jimei x Arles Discovery Award, presents an innovative body of work that unites photography and biology in a truly unexpected manner: the artist immerses film rolls used to photograph natural landscapes in his own stomach acid. The result is unexpectedly beautiful, and somewhat disturbing. In some works, traces of the landscapes remain, while others appear to have been totally ‘digested’. This provocative, experimental series nods to the traditional darkroom process of developing images in chemicals, while seeking to bypass the distance between a photographer and their subject. As a whole, the series is hallucinatory, puzzling and downright fun.

Hu Weiyi’s solo exhibition, The Inner Darkroom, is on show at Ground Control.

Instagram:@hu_weiyi

Les Rencontres d’Arles continues until 4 October 2026. Head to rencontres-arles.com for further information on exhibition opening times and more.

By Sofia Carreira-Wham