Giulia Essyad. Other Planes

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.