Reiffers Art Initiatives - "1000 milliards d'images" Prize exhibition 2025
"1000 milliards d'images" is the fourth group exhibition of the Reiffers Art Initiatives Prize.
The image is their raw material, their playground for experimenting with new forms and imagining alternative types of narratives. Whether photographic or video-based, virtual or real, found on social media or created ex nihilo, this visual matter is transformed in their hands, hybridized and rearranged, unafraid to venture into the strange and uncanny to jolt us from our stupor in the face of the endless deluge of a thousand billion images that flood our daily lives.
In the films of Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel, 3D animation merges with live action. Their “impure” cinema resists classification and tonal boundaries—ranging from absurdity to extreme violence, from cynicism to naivety. The photographs of Jean-Vincent Simonet, meanwhile, blur the lines of their origin: hand-painted by the artist or created by artificial intelligence? With him, the image regains its plasticity and seems to seek a renewed aura, reconciled with the 21st century.
Anhar Salem, on her part, embraces those images that show too much, omnipresent on social networks and in continuous flow. She questions their power in our societies, their influence on our lifestyles and collective imaginations. Finally, with Nanténé Traoré, the photographic print is transferred onto velvet, giving it a mysterious, shifting materiality. The image seems to vanish, to move toward abstraction. Could it be that the image is more powerful when it doesn’t show?
Anhar Salem is the winner of the 2025 Reiffers Art Initiatives Prize.
Born in 1993 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Anhar Salem lives and works between Jeddah and Paris. A self-taught artist, she first studied computer science at the Arab Open University in Jeddah before pursuing a postgraduate program at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing, France. Drawing on her personal experience with social media and the endless streams of images available online, Anhar Salem explores themes such as self-representation and the virtual extension of our lives on social networks.
Reiffers Art Initiatives is a foundation created to support young contemporary creation and cultural diversity.
Reiffers Art Initiatives’ mission is to support France’s new art scene and give it international visibility. It finances and gives exposure to thirty emerging artists every year, who will influence tomorrow’s contemporary art scene.