Région Sud Art Prize
Since its beginnings, Art-o-rama has been committed to participating in the professionalization of young artists and allowing them to encounter different actors of the art world – curators, gallery owners, critics, collectors…
Each year with the Région Sud Prize, Art-o-rama offers visibility to the young creation from Art Schools of the Region Sud, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. The Prix Region Sud Art is aimed at artists who have graduated with a DNSEP degree within the last 5 years from one of the art schools of Region Sud.
The Showroom section highlights the work of 4 artists selected by a curator. The curator accompanies them in the presentation of their work, produces a critical text and introduces the artists to the gallery owners and publishers participating in the fair, who will then be invited to vote for the winner of the Region Sud Prize of the year. The following year, this artist will benefit from an exhibition space in the Gallery section of Art-o-rama following a two-month residency within the Moly-Sabata / Albert Gleizes Foundation. The artist will be the recipient of a 2 000 € grant and a catalog will be published with the support of Département des Bouches-du-Rhône and de Rendez-Vous du Design et l’Art Contemporain (RDVDAC). Since 2021, the Showroom artists benefit from a new residency program created by a regional network of art centers and venues from the Région. The 3 other artists will then each partake in one of the following residencies: Centre d’Arts Plastiques Fernand Léger de Port-de-Bouc, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Châteauvert et Voyons-Voir, art contemporain & territoire.
The Region Sud Prize often stands as a first experience for artists in a commercial environment of international scope and allows the galleries participating in Art-o-rama to discover artists who were formed in our region. It is a real platform of professionalization putting forward their work to a large public, as much amateur as professional. It is an opportunity for meetings, often sales, and first collaborations with galleries.
The laureate of the Région Sud Art Prize 2025 is Juliette George
The curator for the Art Showroom 2026 is Pierre-Antoine Lalande
At Full Speed
With: Nina Boughanim, Maïssane Alibrahimi, Louise Belin, Marine Pistien
A fair is a place where one learns to look quickly. To skim. Trajectories cross, conversations are cut short, works appear and vanish almost as soon as they’ve appeared. We keep moving, in a straight line or on the diagonal, sometimes taking an accidental detour. Attention leaps from one booth to the next and forms parade past without ever quite settling. Some stay with us only a few seconds; others keep working on us long after they’ve left our field of vision. Should we stop, or keep going?
At Full Speed starts from this particular condition: an eye caught up in haste. Not to artificially slow down the visit, nor to set contemplation against the event’s rhythm, but to take this acceleration itself as a starting point. Brought together for the Prix Région Sud Art, Nina Boughanim, Maïssane Alibrahimi, Louise Belin and Marine Pistien are not presented as four proposals to be judged against one another, but as four stages of a single journey. While their respective worlds remain deeply singular, they share quiet affinities: they extend one another, sometimes contradict one another, and above all answer one another. Where the context of a prize naturally invites comparison, this proposal chooses instead to put things in relation. Each artist evades an easy, too-obvious reading: a familiar setting comes unmoored, an image persists though it seemed already worn out, a body fragments until it becomes landscape, objects retain the trace of an action that is nonetheless absent.
Their works don’t ask for more time — they manufacture a second look. The one that comes back after the fact, once the visit has already moved on elsewhere. Whether it’s an architecture made of sugar, a webcam turned into painting, skin enlarged into abstraction, or sharp nails piercing through walls, they confront our certainties and settle in with a slight delay. Some multiply, reproduce, or disintegrate. What we thought we had understood in an instant turns out, gradually, to be less clear, more ambiguous.
In a fair, every booth is thus a provisional production. At Full Speed fully embraces this brevity. These four presentations seek neither to interrupt the movement nor to resist the rush. They slip into it, then keep acting on us after we’ve passed by. Their effect sometimes only reveals itself once we are already behind them.
Pierre-Antoine Lalande, 2026 Art Showroom Curator
Pierre-Antoine Lalande (born in 1991, lives and works in Montreuil) is an independent curator and art critic. Trained in political science and modern literature, he has held positions in communications and patronage at institutions such as KADIST, the MEP, and the Giacometti Foundation. He is currently developing exhibition projects after collaborating with various venues, including the artist-run space Julio, Galerie Sultana, and Chapelle XIV. He also writes for Mouvement magazine and has joined the curatorial team of Fotofestival Lenzburg for its 2026 edition.
