Congratulations to Laure Marville and Marta Riniker-Radich, HEAD - Geneva graduates in visual arts, both winners of the Swiss Art Awards 2022 in the ART category.

HEAD also congratulates the collective, Wages for Wages Against, composed in part of HEAD alumni, which won the Swiss Art Awards 2022 in the CRITICS, PUBLISHING, EXHIBITION category.

The Kiefer Hablitzel Foundation has given pride of place to young artists from the HEAD by awarding 5 out of 7 prizes to HEAD alumni - Geneva; congratulations to James Bantone, Sebastian Davila, Anjesa Dellova, Azize Ferizi and Camille Kaiser!

Marta Riniker-Radich
Marta Riniker-Radich often combines drawings with texts, objects and installations, involving personal experiences with broader narratives, as in this case the intertwining of the global economy, the labour market and survival in an increasingly alienating urban landscape. Here, the rich repertoire of elements for which the artist is known gives us clues: mouldy interiors, books on professional dermatitis, rudimentary tools, the close-up of a subconjunctival haemorrhage. The surface of the drawings is fleshy and smooth, and traces of moisture left by the artist’s hand are also detectable on the paper. With great economy of means, Marta Riniker-Radich has the ability to make the strange and the unfamiliar familiar, inviting us to follow in her footsteps through the back alleys of our precarious existence.

Laure Marville
Laure Marville’s installation A Single Egg Can Be My Shelter occupies the entire space from floor to ceiling, thus evoking both the wallpaper that decorates the domestic space and the billboard used in urban surroundings. The serial repetition of motifs or slogans enabled by the linocut technique is overlaid with interventions executed in situ that modulate, highlight or modify the fabric of meanings. Individual phrases (“A single feather can be my poem”; “Beginning to love the abyss I am made of”), notes and citations that open up the space of collective demand to the sound of singular voices infiltrate the interstices between repeated injunctions and statements (“BURN YOUR BOYFRIEND”; “I WILL DO IT ANYWAY”). In awarding this Swiss Art Award, the jury salutes the quality of a committed and highly virtuosic work that uses and deviates from visual and linguistic conventions and codes, and which, through this montage technique, creates new ‘sparks of meaning’ to expand thought without abandoning the pleasure of the eye.

Wages for Wages Against

Founded in 2017, the collective Wages for Wages Against has organised various exhibitions, group discussions and surveys exploring the remuneration of artists in Switzerland. With How do we choose our artists? it extends its field of enquiry to the matter of jury processes, and proposes using the SAA as a think tank to shed light on the process and, together with artists, jury members, FOC staff and the audience, consider alternatives. The results of this project, comprising a survey, a gathering place and group discussions, will be compiled into a multi-language publication designed to spur institutional changes.