Claudine Doury — Artek et Loulan Beauty

Espace Saint Cyprien
56 Allée Charles de Fitte — 31300 Toulouse, France
From the 13rd of March to the 13^rd of June 2013

Claudine Doury presents two of her most iconic series, Artek and Loulan Beauty. The first one takes its name from an old camp for young pioneers under the soviet union. The second is a journey through central Asia.

“Time is and will always be the primary material of photography. This statement is, in Claudine Doury’s work, amplified by her taste for transitions and changeovers into unknown periods. From her first travels to her close family, she reiterates the narrative of an harmonious world, spontaneous and civilized. An Eden that would be nothing less than an extinct museum if it wasn’t travelled by a subtle feeling of fear: how much longer will it last? Like an adolescence endlessly reenacted.

Reenacted with Artek, that takes its name from the last summer camp for the children of the Russian Nomenklatura. No nostalgia of the soviet pump in this long-term work. Instead, the amazing vitality of those summers in Crimea, on the coasts of the Black Sea, where young people are at the leading edge of life. Decors and uniforms don’t even highlight the anachronism of a disappearing world anymore. They are the perfect framework of this theatre, a general rehearsal that only adolescence will be able to interpret.

In her next work, Loulan Beauty, Claudine Doury invokes an ancient kingdom located on the Silk Road, on the borders of Central Asia and China. Here, the allusion to time and history is so strong and permanent that it becomes almost invisible. Each photograph is loaded with the past and foresees a future made of exile. A strange absence of present time.”

Thomas Doubliez