
Giulia Essyad. Other Planes
Giulia Essyad is transforming the MCBA’s Espace Projet into a sensory and spiritual labyrinth, somewhere between digital art and introspection. The Lausanne-based artist, winner of the 9th Prix Gustave Buchet, questions the mechanisms of desire and commodification through an immersive installation combining technology, memory and an inner quest.
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
Giulia Essyad, "KNOW THYSELF (NARCISSUS)", 2025. Study for double-sided lightbox. © Giulia Essyad
Prix Gustave Buchet
The Gustave Buchet Foundation was set up in 1987 to keep alive the memory of the painter Gustave Buchet (1888-1963), an artist from the canton of Vaud who worked in Paris between the wars and was influenced by Futurism and Purism.
Established in 1993, the Prix Gustave Buchet has since been awarded to the following artists:
Prix Gustave Buchet 1993: Pierre Chevalley
Prix Gustave Buchet 2000: Anne Blanchet
Prix Gustave Buchet 2003: Christian Floquet
Prix Gustave Buchet 2006: Hervé Graumann
Prix Gustave Buchet 2010: Philippe Decrauzat &
Jean-Luc Manz
Prix Gustave Buchet 2013: Christopher Fülleman
Prix Gustave Buchet 2017: Guillaume Pilet
Prix Gustave Buchet 2021: Sandrine Pelletier