Giulia Essyad: Other Planes

The Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (MCBA), is pleased to present Giulia Essyad’s solo exhibition Other Planes, commissioned for its Project Space.

Giulia Essyad stages and transforms 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 transforms the Espace Projet gallery into an immersive installation that weaves together DIY technology, digital imagery, and personal memory.

For over fifteen years, the artist has continually returned to the self-portrait—a genre she began exploring as a teenager through drawing, and which she continues to pursue by subverting the commercial aesthetic of lightboxes. Recently, she has focused on the invisible aspects of the body: emotions, pain, pleasure, as well as the stereotypes associated with expressing these states of consciousness. For Other Planes, she also draws inspiration from mystical poetry, guided by the conviction that at the heart of all things lies an impenetrable mystery.

The new works on view embrace porosity and transparency. They reveal their making—traces of hands, machines, and digital tools like Photoshop brushes are deliberately left visible. The object becomes a site of exchange, not concealment, inviting viewers into the process rather than shutting them out. Materiality is treated not as a mystery to be decoded but as a shared reality to be explored. Craft is evident—even in digital works—asserting that one does not need mastery to engage meaningfully with a medium.

Having grown up in Lausanne, the artist reconnects here with a place filled with memories, one she used to hang out in when the MCBA was still an industrial wasteland. The exhibition unfolds as a journey imbued with the ambivalent feeling of longing, caught between nostalgia and aspiration, between what has been and what remains elusive.

Curated by Pierre-Henri Foulon, Curator of contemporary art, MCBA

Biography
Giulia Essyad (b. 1992) lives and works in Geneva. Recent solo exhibitions include INNARDS at the Centre d’édition contemporaine, Geneva (2024); Tunnel Vision III at Tunnel Tunnel and Cinema Bellevaux, Lausanne (2023); Chocolate Factory at Cherish, Geneva (2020); Blue Period at Lokal Int, Biel (2020); A Selene Blues at Fri Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg (2020). Her work has been recognized with a Swiss Art Award in 2023 and, more recently, the 9th Gustave Buchet Prize in 2025.

Edition
A limited-edition T-shirt, designed by the artist and produced by the independent screen-printing studio Ladycotton, will be released on the occasion of the exhibition and available for purchase at the MCBA Book and Gift Shop.
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