Vanessa Safavi Swiss, b. 1980

Vanessa Safavi (b. 1980, Switzerland) lives and works in Berlin. In 2003, she began her studies at the École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL), where she obtained her degree in Visual Arts in 2007. A number of artist residencies have punctuated her path, taking her from Paris to Cape Town, from Johannesburg to New York, from Peru to Heiligenberg, and to Rome in 2021. Alongside her artistic practice, she worked as an auditor for the State Secretariat for Migration in Bern, which feeds her research into issues of territory, colonization, and migratory flows. In 2018, she resumed her studies at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD), where she earned a Master’s degree in 2020.

Her research is strongly influenced by her own cultural identity, which spans three countries and two continents. In her work, she frequently explores the complex and ambiguous tension between corporeality and identity, often working with silicone— a material evocative of skin or organs yet paradoxically seemingly inorganic. Safavi easily jumps from one plastic universe to another depending on the story that interests her, drawing on cultural references from Antiquity and Greek mythology. She invites unexpected materials such as silicone, appealing to the legacy of “soft sculpture” or the “Antiform” movement, which uses industrial materials in a more sensitive way.

Since the 2010s, Vanessa Safavi has received critical recognition both in Switzerland and internationally. Her works have been shown at Kunsthaus Glarus in Glaris (2011) in her first major solo exhibition, followed by solo shows in Altkirch, Paris, and Basel (2012), São Paulo (2014), Bentheim (2016), and Fribourg (2019). Winner of the Illy Prize in 2012 and the Irène Raymond Prize in 2019, her work is regularly exhibited in galleries, notably in Berlin, Brussels, Athens, London, and Zurich.