Reiffers Art initiatives - Exposition "Des corps libres"
“Des Corps Libres – Une jeune scène française", Reiffers Art’s first exhibition of its group-wide initiatives.
This exhibition invites us to explore the body’s possibilities ౼ singular or universal; evanescent, fantastical or digital; anchored in our current world, science fiction or utopian.
From the body-object to the body-subject, from the figurative body to the imprint of a body, from a dream body to a digital avatar body, it is not just a question of freely and opening describing the body, but also of creating the possibility of looking at it in a new way, with total freedom.
The exhibition brings together an entire generation of young talent from the French scene: Ymane Chabi-Gara, Salomé Chatriot, Jean Claracq, Kenny Dunkan, Ben Elliot, Tarek Lakhrissi, Chalisée Naamani, Valentin Ranger, Sara Sadik, Pol Taburet, Sophie Varin, Julie Villard & Simon Brossard, Manon Wertenbroek and Gaspar Willmann.
Curated by Reiffers Art Initiatives committee member Thibaut Wychowanok, the exhibition's body of work questions the representation and fluctuating materiality of the body and celebrates its diversity, struggles and contemporary emancipation.
We produced an art book for the exhibition, containing a series of texts that give context to the work of 15 French artists from the new contemporary scene.
It also features a set of illustrations including images from the exhibition and details on each piece. It is not only a complete visual summary of Reiffers Art Initiatives’ first collective exhibition but also an invitation to explore the body’s possibilities.
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.
Other projects
Reiffers Initiatives - Mentorship Exhibition 2025
The fifth Reiffers Initiatives Mentorship Exhibition opens on October 24 during Art Basel, featuring a unique exhibition by Daniel Buren and Miles Greenberg.
On the occasion of Mentorship 2025, Daniel Buren presents a permanent in situ work entitled ‘La Façade aux Acacias,’ entirely covering the Reiffers Initiatives Foundation venue at 30 rue des Acacias, Paris 17th.
Daniel Buren’s ‘La Façade aux Acacias’ covers the entire façade with large isosceles triangles and zigzagging diagonals, creating a dynamic interplay between geometry, light, and the surrounding cityscape. Alongside this, he presents a second in situ work, ‘New Images of the Sky.’ Both works, created to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the mentorship program, transform the building into an artistic canvas and invite viewers to see urban space in a new way.
As a mentee in the 2025 program, Miles Greenberg presents new monumental aluminum cast sculptures and a never-before-seen performance by Yseult. His exhibition, ‘Gods of Solaris,’ explores the dialogue between his sculptural and performative practices.
His large-scale immersive works place the body at the center, exploring its poetics through slowness, the decomposition of form, and the lens of the African diaspora. His extreme performances become sculptures and videos, creating ritual spaces where audiences experience emotions beyond language.
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.
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.