On November 6, 2024, Paris Photo—the largest international photography fair in the world—returned to its majestic home, the Grand Palais, now back to its full glory after an extensive four-year, pre-Olympic restoration. Beyond rejuvenating the building, the refurbishment seems to have added a breath of fresh air to the fair, which felt bigger and brighter than ever, with 236 exhibitors from 33 countries, including 191 galleries and 45 publishers.

At Paris Photo, commercial booths sit alongside curated sections and several installations by the fair’s partners – the stand-out this year being BMW’s presentation of The Green Ray, by BMW ART MAKERS 2024 award-winners, artist Mustapha Azeroual and curator Marjolaine Lévy.

Founded in 2021, the award was created as a platform to showcase artists and curators with innovative practices that have images at their core and focus on contemporary issues – particularly social and environmental, as exemplified by this year’s winners. "The particularity of this programme is that it brings together an artist and a curator...Working alongside the artist, the curator acts as artistic director, scenographer and consultant, ensuring that the project is carried out to the highest artistic standards and on schedule," said Maryse Bataillard, head of corporate communications and CSR at the BMW Group, France.

Both Azeroual and Lévy have a keen interest in the relationship between abstraction and narrative. The Green Ray – a series of enigmatic lenticulars – brilliantly embodies this, playing as it does with photographic techniques and colours abstracted from photographic images, to create works that explore our impact on the environment.

The starting point for The Green Ray was Azeroual's desire to give form to light – an endeavour that has preoccupied artists throughout time. He is particularly interested in the liminality of sunrises and sunsets, as seen from the high seas – and the way pollutants in the air add further ambiguity to this visual phenomenon.

In order to create the artworks and to limit their environmental impact, Azeroual and Lévy approached the global sailing community – inviting them, with careful guidance, to photograph dawn and dusk skies around the world. As a result, the duo were able to capture imagery from the Arctic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea, whilst minimising their travel and maximising the project’s sustainability credentials.

Azeroual selected colours from these images to create a unique twilight palette, which he used to ‘paint’ new pieces that were then fabricated as lenticulars – a type of photographic print that uses specific lenses to create the illusion of depth, and that appear to move as the viewer moves around them. Lenticulars rely on the use of at least two contrasting images to work. Inspired by this, Azeroual chose to use colours from more than one location in many of the pieces, engaging the viewer in a journey around the world. The resulting body of work is at once subtle and rich, disorientating and grounding, and exquisitely spellbinding.

It’s also fundamentally accessible, something that was crucial to both Azeroual and Lévy who told STIR, “This work can appeal to everyone – the apparent simplicity of the form, which initially looks like just colours on a background – is something everyone can appreciate.” Lévy also quotes art historian Alexander Alberro, who believes, “The more works engage the viewer's nervous system, the more egalitarian they are,” referring to the ability of The Green Ray to stimulate the eye through its multifaceted and metamorphosing format. Indeed, the work’s first iteration this summer, at the world-renowned photography festival Les Rencontres d’Arles, was a site-specific, immersive installation in the cloister of Saint-Trophime, designed specifically to heighten that stimulation. On arrival, visitors were invited to first enter a ‘light-lock’ – a space devoid of any lighting – where their retinas were given time to adjust before they were plunged into a well-lit room filled with two monumental lenticular triptychs. Entering the installation this way meant the artworks and their colours were, even more, affecting and arousing.

Azeroual explains, “I try to question the experience that one has in front of an artwork and to move photography into being a medium of experience,” a more inclusive and less intimidating prospect for many than approaching art.

Although the quality of the viewers’ experience of the artworks is key when launching the ART MAKERS, BMW also wanted to prioritise the experience of the artist creating them. The brand is behind a number of culture-centric prizes, including the Premio Mestre di Pittura in Madrid and the Preis der Nationalgalerie in Berlin. However, as with most awards, grants and residencies, these have always been dedicated to artists alone. BMW ART MAKERS created a platform to support the very particular, very valuable and oft-under-recognised collaborative relationship between artists and curators.

Bataillard explained, “This programme highlights the complementary talents of each individual to create a large-scale collective project, from the initial idea to the final work.” Marjolaine Lévy explains, “It’s an interesting concept – it’s very precious for artists and curators to be supported to build a project together.”

As a curator who works closely with artists to conceive and realise projects, it is encouraging to see this very specific relationship recognised and celebrated. It is particularly heartening to see a focus on those working independently, outside of institutions or more formalised frameworks that would normally provide crucial support – financial and otherwise.

The open call for next year’s BMW ART MAKERS is now open to artist and curator partnerships from all over the world. The deadline is December 01, 2024.