(RE)GENERATION, the group show for the third edition of the Reiffers Art Initiatives Prize supporting young French artists and cultural diversity, will bring together the work of five artists selected by the artistic committee: Majd Abdel Hamid, Alex Ayed, Clédia Fourniau, Garance Früh and Aïcha Snoussi.

The group exhibition will be at the Acacias Art Center, 30 rue des Acacias, Paris 17th, a stone's throw from the Arc de Triomphe, from 26 April to 8 June 2024. The Reiffers Art Initiatives Prize recognises rising talent emerging from a new cosmopolitan French scene. The winning artist will receive a cash prize of €10,000 and a commission for a work to be incorporated in the fund's collection.

This year's curator is Vittoria Matarrese, Director of the Bally Foundation in Lugano, Switzerland, since November 2022.

The (RE)GENERATION exhibition brings together the work of five artists selected by the Reiffers Art Initiatives artistic committee, all of them from the French and international contemporary art scene. Majd Abdel Hamid, Alex Ayed, Clédia Fourniau, Garance Früh and Aïcha Snoussi belong to the same generation, born between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, but what links them is much deeper. Their way of addressing the world, the freedom of their narratives and forms, the imaginary elsewhere that each of these artists evokes, proposes a form of regeneration of the gaze, of history, of practice.

Clédia Fourniau and Garance Früh set out to deconstruct the very material of their creations. While Clédia works on the depth of her painting showing all the successive layers that are undone and rebuilt with each reflection and in which the observer plays a central role, Garance proceeds with the literal decomposition of objects linked to the so-called feminine universe - lingerie, pushchairs and so on - working on the question of intimacy and the limits of its porosity. Both artists are keen to highlight a certain physicality, a capacity for works to be impregnated and permeable.

Majd Abdel Hamid, Alex Ayed and Aïcha Snoussi use their art to explore the fertility of images, their works conceived as an invitation to discover newness, a way of moving away from the dominant narratives. Majd's cartographic work, often inspired by places in his native Palestine, proposes a reconstruction of the history of the present. It brings to light a landscape of the unconscious, stitching together a space of infinite possibilities, similarly a memory and a struggle against the ancestral fear of cultural otherness. Alex Ayed, who has been 'exiled' at sea for months, imagines his works as an open trajectory where, point by point, we can reconstitute the poetics of wandering, a shifting and reversible geography representing the multiple forms that dreams take when they link the real world to the invisible, like the wind caught in its sails.

Aïcha Snoussi, for her part, immerses us in another temporality, somewhere between archaeology and science fiction, creating resonances with a distant past and a hoped-for future. With works imagined as ancient artefacts, fossils and cave paintings, Aïcha opens up a necessary space where fragments of personal and collective stories reach us, reconstructing the possibility of diversity on the ruins of a "forgotten queer civilisation". Despite their very different practices, they all summon up fiction, the novel or the invention of alternative rituals, generating new forms and narratives with restorative power.

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