Giulia Essyad. Other Planes

Inspired by the architecture of transitional spaces, Giulia Essyad transforms the MCBA’s Espace Projet gallery into a sensory and spiritual labyrinth. Recipient of the 9th Gustave Buchet Prize, the Lausanne-born artist explores the mechanisms of desire and commodification through an immersive installation that weaves together DIY technologies, digital imagery, and personal memories.

Giulia Essyad employs digital technologies to stage and transform her own body, seeking to challenge the mechanisms of commodification that shape our relationship to desire within a society where advertising is omnipresent. Continuing her exploration of the relation between self-representation and inner life, she has transformed the MCBA Espace Projet gallery into an immersive installation that evokes the labyrinth of consciousness. New works are revealed along a winding path shaped by the gallery’s architecture, which imposes shifting moods throughout the space. Drawing on the commercial visual language of light boxes, Essyad contrasts the hyper-artificial aesthetic of her imagery with the depth of a spiritual search. This inquiry is also marked by a return to origins.

Raised in Lausanne, the artist reclaims the museum as a site rich in personal memory—one she visited often when it was still an abandoned industrial zone. The adolescent urge to romanticize mysticism is met here with a more measured distance, infusing the exhibition with a complex sense of longing—caught between nostalgia and aspiration, between what was and what remains ineffable and beyond our reach.

Winner of the 9th Gustave Buchet Prize, Giulia Essyad (*1992) lives and works in Geneva.

Curator of the exhibition: Pierre-Henri Foulon, curator of contemporary art, MCBA