Adventurer, photographer and writer Ella Maillart (1903–1997) traversed Asia several times in the 20th century. In 2025, her entire body of work was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in recognition of its importance. Photo Elysée, which has held her photographic archives – consisting of thousands of images – since 1988, pays tribute to Maillart with this exhibition.

Focusing on Maillart’s four major journeys to Asia in the 1930s, the exhibition sets her images in dialogue with her writings and shows how her work serves as a record of a pivotal time in global history.

Luc Delahaye (b. 1962), is part of a generation of photographers who re-examined the relationship between documentary and artistic practice.

Delahaye has sought to confront the dislocations of the modern world. Through his mostly large-scale color works – documenting conflicts in Haiti, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine, as well as OPEC and COP conferences – he examines the turbulent world we inhabit and the forums that are supposed to bring order to chaos.

Whether captured in a single shot or assembled from fragments on a computer over several months, his photographs always bring us face to face with reality, experienced either immediately or after the fact. As Delahaye explains, he seeks to articulate this reality from a purely documentary stance, without demonstration – “to achieve unity with reality through a form of absence, a form of unconsciousness, even. A silent unity. Photography is something quite beautiful: it allows us to reconnect the self with the world.”

Spanning a quarter-century of photographic output, this retrospective brings together around 40 large-format works – some specially produced for the exhibition and shown for the first time – alongside a major installation that marks a departure from Delahaye’s previous practice. The exhibition is currently on display at Jeu de Paume in Paris. It will soon move to Photo Elysée for its first showing on Swiss soil.

The mudac is inaugurating its new exhibition space, Le carré, with Jean Tschumi Designer. This exhibition, produced in collaboration with the Artistic Commission of Vaudoise Assurances, focuses on a particular aspect of the great Swiss architect’s work: his furniture designs for Le Cèdre, the headquarters of Vaudoise Assurances in Lausanne.

« Come and see here what you won’t see elsewhere! » is the slogan for the permanent exhibition, laid out chronologically over two floors to showcase treasures from Vaud’s art collections, with some three hundred works dating from the eighteenth century to the present day.

In 2025, the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts of the City of Lausanne (mudac) will give Swiss designer Kévin Germanier carte blanche to take over the museum with the same originality and creativity that have characterised his approach to fashion for several years.

Through her sculptures, found objects, writing and films, Marina Xenofontos interrogates the material manifestations of memory and history. For her show in the Espace Projet, she explores the question of space, both virtual and real.