Solstice

Claudine Doury

OPENING: 25 September 2024, at Rifugio Digitale
September 25 – October 13, 2024 | Wed. – Sun. 11.00-19.00

From September 25 to October 13, 2024 Rifugio Digitale presents the exhibition Solstice by photographer Claudine Doury, which is the seventh and final stage of the exhibition cycle dedicated to contemporary photography Homecoming, conceived by Irene Alison and curated by Irene Alison and Paolo Cagnacci. The event is organized in collaboration with Forma Edizioni and the Associazione Infoto and thanks to the support of Gruppo AF and Banca Ifigest. The opening will be held on Wednesday, September 25, 2024 at 6.30 p.m. in the presence of the artist and curators.

From the day of the opening, it will also be possible to consult the catalog of available works by Claudine Doury on the Forma Edizioni website.

Claudine Doury, Solstice-Kupala, the llake Ives, Belarus 2019.

Meet the artist

BIO

Claudine Doury is a French photographer born in Blois and based in Paris.
She has been awarded the Leica Oscar Barnack Award (1999), the World Press Photos Prize (2000) and the Prix Niepce in 2004.
In 2017 she was the winner of a national commission from the Ministry of Culture on youth in France, and received the Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière Prize- Académie des Beaux-Arts that same year.
In 2022, she was the winner of the photographic commission from the Ministry of Culture “Radioscopie de la France”.

Her work is regularly exhibited in France and abroad, and her photographs are included in prestigious private and public collections including the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Neuflize OBC and the Fondation Hermès, the artothèques of La Rochelle and La Roche-sur-Yon, the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, the Fonds d’Art Contemporain in Meyrin (Switzerland), the Musée de la Photographie in Braga, l’Imagerie in Lannion, and the Agnès B collection.

She has published 6 monographs : Peuples de Sibérie (Le Seuil, 1999), Artek, un été en Crimée (La Martinière, 2004), Loulan Beauty (Le Chêne, 2007)), Sasha (Le Caillou Bleu, 2011), L’Homme Nouveau (Filigranes, 2016), Amour (Chose Commune, 2019) and Solstice (Originiedizioni, 2024).

At the intersection of reality and fiction, her work deals with notions of memory and transition, notably around adolescence and travel, central themes of her work.

Claudine Doury is represented by In Camera gallery in Paris and she is a member of Vu agency.

In copertina: Claudine Doury

Solstice
Press text

Between 2023 and 2024, the Homecoming exhibition cycle has explored the concept of identity in relation to places, viewing the idea of “home” as a return to the origins, a rediscovery of an artist’s own culture or roots. The exhibition entitled Solstice, featuring the work of Claudine Doury, curated by Irene Alison and Paolo Cagnacci, closes the cycle, taking us – through the pictures of the French photographer – on a voyage of discovery of ancient rituals but also of the troubled and restless world we are living in right now: the issues affecting relations between mankind and nature; the interaction between present and memory; the creative, revolutionary power of femininity; the fine, almost imperceptible, line between transition, loss, change and new beginnings.

As an empathetic and sensitive traveler who, in the last several decades, has extensively documented regions like central Asia, Crimea and Siberia, as a photographer of great talent and winner of the prestigious Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 1999, for more than a decade, every June 21, Doury has set out on a voyage that has taken her from St. Petersburg to Maloyaroslavets in Russia, and then to the island of Lake Ives in Bielorussia, to Kaunas, Vilnius, and the Polish and Latvian farmlands, to document the rites of the solstice.

Called Kupala by the Slavs, Kupalès by the Balts, the night of the solstice is a traditional celebration with roots that go deep into the pagan feasts linked to the forces of nature and the cult of the sun, an event that welcomes and celebrates the brief periods in which the skies of the north achieve twilight but never darkness. Forgotten by most of the Western European world, the pagan rituals of the sun, rooted in centuries of history, are still greatly revered in the northern regions of Eastern Europe. Doury illustrates them with mysterious, delicate photographs, on the borderline between reality and the dreamworld, to evoke the invisible forces that move through these places in a night that seems endless and that promises new beginnings, celebrating the expressive and spiritual power of the light.

Program

  • September 25, 1:00 p.m.: press conference with Claudine Doury
    free entrance

  • September 25 from 4,00 p.m. to 5,30 p.m. at La Bottega di Infoto at 4 Leonardo Bruni Street: lecture with Claudine Doury in dialogue with curator Irene Alison
    free entrance subject to availability

  • September 25, 6:30 p.m.: exhibition opening with Claudine Doury and curators Irene Alison and Paolo Cagnacci
    free entrance

  • September 25 – October 13, 2024, Wed.-Sun. 11 a.m.-7 p.m.: tours of the exhibition
    free entrance; reservation required for guided tours

Useful Materials

Gallery

Press

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