A Polaroid hacked with artificial intelligence, a length of fabric, a family archive, a muslin veil: each artist brings their own tools, making do with what’s at hand, to find “The Best Possible Way to Tell the Truth…” Under that manifesto of a title, the French-Beninese curator Nadine Hounkpatin has brought together, at the Espace Monoprix, seven artists whose work “is there to open our eyes, not give us formal answers.”

The first room sets the tone with Phan Quang and his series “Re/cover.” Born in 1976 in Binh Dinh, the Vietnamese artist spent over a decade as a photojournalist before turning to this more conceptual kind of photography. In it, he documents the children born, in Vietnam, to Vietnamese women and Japanese soldiers who stayed on in the country after the Second World War, before those men were recalled to Japan, leaving wives and children behind.

Phan Quang, Re/cover No. 7, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2014, series Re/cover, 2013–2016. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Bao.

In the rural region north of Hanoi where these families still live, Phan Quang photographs their homes, filled with portraits of vanished fathers and grandfathers, surrounded by objects that bear witness to that uprooting. To wrap these absent men in a ghostly presence, Phan Quang searched for a very fine, transparent fabric, and tracked down a wedding-veil factory in Kyoto founded in 1955, the very year the last Japanese soldiers left the country. Earning these families’ trust took repeated visits, until he became, for some of them, almost a member of the family.

A complete change of material in the next room, where Jordan Beal shows “Lineaments”: landscapes of Martinique, reworked with artificial intelligence into grainy, unstable relics that take apart the colonial visual codes inherited from the island. “These landscapes are spaces of repressed memory, worlds the AI seems to unearth without understanding their full historical depth,” explains Beal.

His thinking owes much to Édouard Glissant, the Martinican poet and theorist of Relation: here, the image acts before it can be understood, through the sheer vibration of warm colours and the grainy texture of the instant print.

A change of material, a change of gesture again, with Souleymane Bachir Diaw, born in 1995 in Dakar and a member of the collective Atelier Ndokette. His series “Sutura” borrows its title from a Wolof word for a virtue of discretion, the art of keeping up appearances. “The masculine has always appeared to me as a contradiction, an impossible in-between between a rigid façade and a blurred heart, expressive perhaps but seemingly inaccessible,” says the artist, who stages clothing and bodies in his studio as so many signs of a masculinity taught, since childhood, to stay silent.

Not far off, Amira Lamti, a Tunisian photographer born in 1996 in Sousse, presents “Bent el Machta,” a series devoted to wedding rites in the Tunisian Sahel. The images function as an archive of gestures and memories that persist, ceremony after ceremony, in Tunisian weddings.

Amira Lamti, Amen, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Mallory Lowe Mpoka, In the Weft of Memory (detail), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2025. Jacquard weave and glass beads. Courtesy of the artist.

Grand-Bubu With Golden Embroidery and Green Headscarf, Grey Area, 2021, series Sutura, 2021–ongoing. Courtesy of the artist.

A Montrealer of Cameroonian and Belgian descent, Mallory Lowe Mpoka, in “Cosmologies of The Heiresses,” built her diptych “Procession I” and “Procession II” around a photograph unearthed in the archives of French Protestant missions. “It’s a celebration of independence. The image conveys hope, and at the same time, it’s a procession of young men, and religion played a part in the colonization of Cameroon,” she told the Montreal daily Le Devoir.

Onto it, she hand-sews, one by one, over at least sixty hours of work, beads the colour of earth, echoing the terracotta shade that covers the walls of her exhibition space, chosen in reference to Cameroonian soil. For the artist, this repeated act of beading is a way of finding herself again, of making a home untethered from any single place, whether Belgium, Cameroon, or Canada.

In Madagascar, Charlotte Yonga continues an inquiry begun elsewhere. Born in 1985 in Paris, the French-Cameroonian artist, who lives between Barcelona and Paris, has been exploring love through a series of residencies: after Senegal, with “Naam Na La” in 2021, and Malta, with “Salt Wind” in 2023, it is in Antananarivo, in 2024, that she discovers a caste system so entrenched that some families, in cases of disapproval, deny transgressive lovers entry to the family tomb, the ultimate sanction.

Charlotte Yonga, Dïane, Mahenina and Belly, Antananarivo, Madagascar, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Charlotte Yonga, The Traveler’s tree, Ampefy, Madagascar, 2024, print on textile. Courtesy of the artist.

Her series “(TSY) Possible,” whose title borrows from a Malagasy love song meaning “(im)possible,” blends photo-novel and sitcom storytelling to tell of these loves thwarted by tradition. For Charlotte Yonga, this amounts to an act of repair: according to Fondation H, which hosted her residency, the artist seeks to widen the field of representation for Black, female, African figures, refocusing the lens on ordinary people who become central in the viewer’s eye.

“As African women, it is essential to grant ourselves the right, the freedom, and the pleasure to fantasize ourselves,” she states. There is no need to leave France to find these same hauntings. Magali Paulin, born in Martinique and a graduate of the Arles photography school, explores a former colonial garden in the Paris region, one much like the garden at Nogent-sur-Marne.

Statues and exhibition pavilions there, overrun by vegetation, are left to the passerby without a word of explanation. “Matter, Phantoms,” her title, points to these mute remains, traces of a colonial past that still weighs on public space. The seven Discovery Award laureates end there. But for one last stop, outside this trail, one must leave the Espace Monoprix and cross the city to the Maison des peintres.

Aman Alam, an Indian artist and winner of the Serendipity x Arles Grant, a fellowship devoted to image-making practices in South Asia, presents “Ozymandias” there, a practice that more broadly explores, according to his foundation, “the Anthropocene, identity, and the politics of perception.” The title is borrowed from Percy Shelley’s poem, in which a traveller comes upon the ruins of a king’s statue in the desert, the proud inscription still intact at its feet: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Aman Alam, Naseem In Prayer, series Ozymandias, 2020–ongoing. Courtesy of the artist.

Around the broken statue, nothing but sand, stretching out of sight. The project, born of the artist’s grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease, renders, according to the Rencontres, “that slow erosion, between forgetting and family ties.” Perhaps that is the real lesson behind the title that presides over this trail: there is no single best way to tell the truth, only as many ways as there are memories worth saving.

“The Best Possible Way to Tell the Truth…”, 2026 Discovery Award, Louis Roederer Foundation, featuring Jordan Beal, Souleymane Bachir Diaw, Mallory Lowe Mpoka, Magali Paulin, Phan Quang, and Charlotte Yonga, is on view at Espace Monoprix at the Rencontres d’Arles through 4 October 2026.

“Lineaments”, Jordan Beal
“Sutura”, Souleymane Bachir Diaw
**“Bent el Machta”, Amira Lamti
**
“Cosmologies of the Heiresses”, Mallory Lowe Mpoka
“Matter, Phantoms”, Magali Paulin
“Re/cover”, Phan Quang
“(TSY) Possible”, Charlotte Yonga
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“Ozymandias”, Aman Alam, is on view at the Maison des peintres

In Arles, New Talents Assemble Their Own Truth