François Bellabas

About Francois Bellabas 

François Bellabas is a French artist based in Paris. After graduating from the ESAL (École Supérieure d’Art de Lorraine) and ENSP (École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, Arles), François Bellabas co-founded in 2017 the creative studio GourauPhong in Paris with Benjamin Roulet. He develops a body of interconnected works across different media. Bellabas plays with the multiple levels of reality produced by and stemming from the photographic medium. He weaves links between physical and virtual existences, questionning memory and the image as data.

Photographic approach of François Bellabas

Francois Bellabas is interested in the various forms of life and their language-related issues, as well as their networks and structures that unfold to enable their existence. His artwork explores the relationships we invent and develop with technology. He uses photography, video, 3D scanning, game engines and sound to record rough material from real-world experiences. From these elements, He creates installations where the interweaving of different media give him the ability to bend times and spaces across these different environments. He dissects and recombines the mutational and uncertain nature of these different layers. Every project he develops is built as a reality with its own rules. Through his work, he is interested in creating situations or experiences that induce perceptual shifts between coexistive realities and offer new hybrid perceptions.

His work Protomaton was part of Aimagine - Photography and generative images. The Protomaton is a mixed media installation where a disassembled computer is reassembled and mounted on a wall. A camera, similar to those found at customs checkpoints, continuously captures everything within its field of vision. An interface with 4 buttons allows the spectator to interact with the installation, with each button linked to a specific prompt. When one of the buttons is pressed, the Protomaton activates and generates a sequence of images. The camera feed is then reinterpreted by a diffusion algorithm, calibrated according to the chosen prompt. Everything within the camera's field of view is transformed and displayed on screen in real time, offering the possibility of being visually reinterpreted by the machine. The resulting images are then recorded, creating a new visual database.

Exhbitions and Publications

His work is exhibited in France and internationally : Art-o-rama (Marseille, 2017), Biennale de l'Image Possible (Liège, 2018), Jeune Création (Paris, 2020), Palais Augmenté II (Grand Palais, Paris, 2022), Centre Photographique d'Île de France (Paris, 2024), Rencontres d'Arles (2024), Shanghai International Photography Festival (Shanghai, 2024) Jimei x Arles International Photography Festival (Jimei, 2024), Contretype (Bruxelles, 2025). He was part of Aimagine- photography and generative images at Hangar Photo Art Center (Bruxelles, 2025).

Francois Bellabas’s Awards

Over the years, his work has been recognized through several distinctions in photography and contemporary art. In 2024, he was named Laureate of the Discovery Award by the Louis Roederer Foundation at the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France. In 2021, he was selected for Plat(t)form 2022 at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In 2019, he was selected for the 69th edition of Jeune Création and nominated for the Prix Robert Schuman.