Villes Invisibles

Nov 2025 - Jan 2026

Villes Invisibles is a survey exhibition that brings together Rut Blees Luxemburg’s large-scale analogue photographs, from London to Dakar, from Jeddah to Le Havre. The glow of the nocturnal city emanates and seduces, yet a darker resonance emerges.

A large column, like an atavistic fertility totem, towers over an excavation, yet the ladder, left behind by the builders, places us firmly in contemporary London. The exhibition includes a photograph of a billboard from the military academy of Santiago, Chile advertising for new recruits in 2005. Genius Loci, a work made recently in Jeddah plays on the contrast between the vanishing and the valued.

The exhibition thematises the city as a construct and its constant transformation, animated by invisible forces. For the philosopher Alexander García Düttmann these photographic urban imaginaries show "the city that is in the process of turning into what it will once have been, the city that is being built, the city that keeps growing, the city that falls into ruins and undoes itself, the city that eliminates, excludes and evicts, the city that is being abandoned, that abandons itself and flees, that escapes towards another city or something other than a city, is also the city of photography, for it must still be staged."