Tatyana Franck

Over the course of four decades, Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla have put together a collection of photographs that is widely recognised as among the World's most important private ones. Spanning the entire history of the medium, it lacks hardly any of the names that forged this history. It comprises some of the most famous masterpieces by artists such as Eugène Atget, Robert Adams, Walker Evans, or Robert Mapplethorpe as well as works by contemporary photographers such as Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, or Thomas Struth. The Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne is one of the world's leading museums entirely dedicated to photography. A highlight in the museum's 2018 exhibition program is the show The Beauty of the Lines, featuring some 120 works from the Gilman Gonzales- Falla collection. The coinciding book presents the selected images in visual confrontations rather than just chronologically, offering a key to their physical quality and inviting the reader to question his or her own individual experience of sensitive relationship to the photographic image. Published alongside the images are an essay exploring the range and significance of the collection and a conversation with Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla.

This is the first retrospective on French-born, New York-based artist Prune Nourry (born 1985), who uses sculpture, installation, performance and video, while also collaborating with researchers and scientists, to address bioethical issues such as gender selection, artificial procreation and genetic engineering. Her critically acclaimed triptych on gender selection started in India with the projects Holy Daughters (2009) and Holy River (2011). The third part, Terracotta Daughters, a life-size army Prune made in Xi'an, China, traveled the world in 2014 before being buried in 2015 as a contemporary archaeological site. This volume surveys ten years of work, with essays by the psychoanalyst Fran ois Ansermet, Sophie Makariou, director of the Mus e national des arts asiatiques Guimet, the artist Orlan, Tatyana Franck, director of the Mus e de l' lys e, the artist Clifford Ross and the Indian sociologist Ravinder Kaur.