Giulia Essyad. Prix Gustave Buchet

Winner of the 9th Prix Gustave Buchet, Giulia Essyad exhibits and transforms her own body using digital technology to question the mechanisms of desire and commodification that are usually associated with it.

This solo show features new works from the artist’s Rose Period cycle. They have been thought out for an installation that is meant to suggest the borderline atmosphere that pervades an abandoned shopping centre. Devoted to internality and the representation of invisible aspects of the body – pain, pleasure, emotions, thoughts, and conscious states – the cycle draws on depictions that have a connection with medicine, spirituality, and pornography, three fields that are directly related to the internality of the body. To this Giulia Essyad adds a dialogue with the languages of advertising, which she sees as our main contemporary visual idiom. The starting point is pink, like the colour of skin on the inside, the living brain, and mucous membranes.

With lightboxes highlighting forgotten fragments of adverts, self-portraits exploring the complexity of identity, and a soundtrack playing like a dissonant jingle in deserted spaces, the vacuity of shopping centres metaphorically suggest the fragmentation of the psyche. In this multifaceted world that summons references to medieval legends, pop culture, and a cyborg aesthetics, the artist creates avatars of herself that have been turned into marketing supports worthy of the most overproduced adverts. By asserting an ultrasensuality and overdetermining the codes of extreme femininity, Essyad invites us to a critical deconstruction of the representation of the self and the contemporary body, freed at last from the codes of classical beauty and imposed norms.

Giulia Essyad was born in 1992 in Lausanne. She lives and works in Geneva.

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