With Claudine Doury’s Solstice exhibition, our journey takes us, through the French photographer’s images, to discover ancient rituals but also absolutely contemporary anxieties and instances: the relationship between human beings and nature; the dialogue between present and memory; the creative and revolutionary power of femininity; the fine line between transition, loss, change and new beginnings.

An empathetic and sensitive traveler who has extensively documented regions such as Central Asia, Crimea, and Siberia in recent decades, a gifted photographer and winner of the prestigious Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 1999, Doury has for more than a decade embarked on a journey every June 21 that takes her from St. Petersburg to Maloyaroslavets in Russia, to Lake Ives Island in Belarus, to Kaunas, Vilnius, and the Polish and Latvian countryside to document solstice rituals. Doury recounts them with mysterious and delicate images, poised between reality and dream, to evoke the invisible forces that move through these places on a night that seems endless and promises new beginnings.