Expanding upon the success of Min | Mon (2023), Gates’s first exhibition in Arles, Le chant du centre will continue the artist’s ongoing exploration of performance, material, and labor in the form of a series of ambitious creative projects. In 2023, Gates transformed La Grande Halle into a participatory installation – debuting his sake collaboration with Sawada Sake Brewery in Tokoname, Japan, and featuring an active DJ booth with vinyl from his personal collection, film, sculpture, and his own ceramic wares. Conceived as a space that invites visitors to experience the key tenets of his artistic practice, Min | Mon underscored the importance of craft, conviviality, and cultural hybridity through a philosophy and speculation he calls “Afro Mingei.”

In Summer 2024, Gates will honor the lineage of his artistic origins as a potter and extend this speculative proposal by converting LUMA Arles’s La Grande Halle into a site of experimental ceramic production. Continuing the artist’s investment in the craft traditions of the Japanese Mingei movement, Gates will invite visitors to observe the performance and process of making, deepening our collective appreciation for the ancient and contemporary significance of clay as a medium. As part of the demonstrative work of this exhibition on ceramic production, the volume of wares accumulated in La Grande Halle will multiply as Gates and potters in his studio will progressively produce sculptures and wares throughout the duration of this exhibition.

In July 2024, as part of Le chant du centre, LUMA Arles will host the Black Artists Retreat (BAR), an almost annual convening of Black artists run by Gates for over a decade. Hatched at a time when Black artists were rarely invited to self-convene outside of white institutions, BAR radically underscored the weight of creating, protecting, and nurturing Black space through care, critical inquiry, and conviviality. Year after year, BAR demonstrates the generative possibilities in carving out space and time for Black artists to rest, be joyous, build community, and share openly in the frame of a retreat. This year, invited artists from France, Europe, and abroad will gather over a period of a few days in Arles to reflect together on their practices, questions of Blackness within Black making traditions, and the presence and prominence of Black contemporary practice in the broader global conversation.