Amira Lamti selected at the Rencontres d’Arles for the 2026 Discovery Award

Doors is pleased to announce that visual artist Amira Lamti, supported by Doors, has been selected for the 2026 Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles, among more than 300 applications from all over the world.

Amira Lamti (b. 1996) is a Tunisian visual artist working across photography, video, and installation. Her practice explores the connections between body, memory, and heritage, drawing on a family history rooted in spiritual practices and popular rituals. A graduate of the Sousse School of Fine Arts and a recipient of the ENSP Arles mentorship program in 2024, she has recently developed projects through residencies at Villa Salammbô and Elyssa (Institut français de Tunisie), La Villette, and Hangar Barcelona.

Her art, infused with themes of heritage and transmission, weaves personal narratives by layering still and moving images drawn from diverse worlds. She exhibits in Tunisia and internationally, including at the Jaou Biennial, Image Festival Amman, Baghdad Photo Week, and Scan Tarragona. In 2025, her work was shown at Jumièges Abbey and at the Palais Kheireddine – Museum of the City of Tunis. In 2026, she will take part in exhibitions at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and at the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has also been presented at Menart (Paris) and Abu Dhabi Art fairs, through the artistic platform Doors and the Yosr Ben Ammar Gallery.

In her series Bent el Machta, presented last year in the group exhibition Slow and Steady Wears the Stone الدوام ينقب الرخام  at Jumièges Abbey and at the Focus on Tunisia at Menart Fair 2025, Amira Lamti—herself the daughter and granddaughter of a machta—reinterprets a traditional wedding ritual from Tunisia’s Sahel region. The machta, a central figure in the jelwa (pre-nuptial ceremony), accompanies the bride in her transition from young woman to wife. Inherited from ancestral practices, this ritual, situated at the crossroads of the sacred and the profane, is believed to originate in the cult of the Punic goddess Tanit.

Having grown up observing this tradition, the artist revisits it by assuming the role of the bride herself and inviting her brother to pose dressed in women’s clothing. Through photography, performance, textile printing, and the use of family archives, she creates works in which generations and memories overlap. By reinventing this ritual, Amira Lamti questions gender roles, the evolution of social practices, and the place of women. The project thus transforms an ancestral rite into a creative ritual, blending art and spirituality while challenging social and cultural norms.

Accompanied by Doors, the exhibition will offer an intimate journey through the jelwa ritual, which the artist observed throughout her childhood. By stepping into the role of the bride and inviting her brother or cousins to pose in traditional women’s garments, Amira Lamti reenacts a ceremony whose history, transmission, and contemporary transformations she interrogates. The works—produced in cyanotype, silkscreen, or digital print and displayed on a range of materials such as paper, papyrus, tulle, and satin—engage in dialogue with images from family archives.

“The best way to tell the truth… may be to accept that in photography it is neither immediate nor neutral. The seven artists brought together for the 2026 Discovery Award demonstrate that truth is constructed through relationships, proximity, and the engagement of bodies, memories, and inheritances. Rooted in plural cultural and historical narratives, activated by ritual, gesture, or intimate archives, photographic truth becomes processual and situated. It embraces subjectivity as an ethical, critical, and political condition for accessing a reality that is always in the making, never fixed once and for all. On the contrary, this reality is built, sometimes contested, and always transformed through these plural and committed perspectives.”

– Nadine Hounkpatin, guest curator

Amira Lamti will exhibit alongside the other artists and organizations selected for the award: Souleymane Bachir Diaw (Senegal), presented by La.ima (France); Jordan Beal (Martinique, France), presented by La Station Culturelle (Martinique, France); Mallory Lowe Mpoka (Canada / Belgium / Cameroon), presented by Occurrence (Canada); Magali Paulin (France), presented by doubledummy (France); Phan Quang, presented by Galerie Bao (France); and Charlotte Yonga (France / Cameroon), presented by Fondation H (Madagascar).

Their projects are accompanied by guest curator Nadine Hounkpatin and will be exhibited during the next edition of the Rencontres d’Arles 2026, from July 6 to October 4, 2026.

During the opening week, a jury will award the Discovery Award to one of the seven selected projects, with the acquisition of works for a total amount of €15,000; and the public will vote for the Public Prize, which will reward one of the projects with an acquisition of works worth €5,000. The works will enter the Rencontres d’Arles collection.