Louis-Cyprien Rials

Louis-Cyprien Rials is a French artist born in 1981 in Paris. He lives and works between France and Iraq. His artistic practice encompasses photography, video, and sculptural installations. Louis-Cyprien Rials explores regions marked by past violence or affected by major conflicts, such as the Middle East, unrecognized countries, and radioactive or forbidden zones, which he considers "involuntary nature parks." Through his work, he presents a silent, sometimes mystical image of these areas, using long, fixed shots devoid of human presence to convey the impossibility of capturing these abandoned, transformed spaces, imbued with beliefs and marked by scars.

After living in Tokyo, Berlin, and Brussels, Louis-Cyprien Rials embarked on extensive travels, including solo motorcycle journeys to Chernobyl, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Nagorno-Karabakh. He spent several months in Bahrain and Russia before settling in northern Iraq, where he documented abandoned villages along the Islamic State's front lines and refugee camps between Kirkuk and Mosul. In 2015, he was selected for the Emerige Revelation grant and held his first solo exhibition at Galerie Dohyang Lee in 2016, supported by the CNAP. From July to September 2021, he resided in Iraq, conducting workshops in conceptual photography and video art with the Iraqi NGO "The Station," aimed at populations affected by the Islamic State.

Louis-Cyprien Rials' work has been featured in various exhibitions, including at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, and the Fondation Le Corbusier. His projects often involve collaborations with local communities and reflect his deep engagement with the geopolitical and cultural contexts of the regions he explores.