Not everything is visible, can be explained or controlled

182 entries, 33 works on display, 13 selected for studio grants. Unlike other exhibitions, a grant exhibition is already subject to a judgement before it even opens. Even before the works are on public view, they have been selected, compared with one another and assessed.

I enter the Helmhaus without having read the jury’s report. Rather than adopting their judgements, I note down my impressions. What follows is not a comprehensive exhibition review, but a tour of those works that move me and, regardless of whether they have received an award, possess a sense of urgency all of their own.

Tereza Glazova, Mirages (Inferior, Superior, Fata Morgana), 2026

Tereza Glazova adopts the golden signage currently familiar from major art institutions and places it right in the centre of the Helmhaus. An arrow points to the next room, announcing ‘pers and downers, calories, dust cigarette smoke’ there. At first glance, the work appears playful, but it quickly reveals its sharp edge. By appropriating institutional wayfinding systems, Glazova questions the mechanisms by which art is oriented, evaluated and, ultimately, hierarchised. The play on words ‘pers and downers’ is particularly intriguing: the familiar ‘highs and downers’ becomes ‘persons and depths’. The arrow points to the room where Glazova’s fellow exhibitors are presenting their artistic works. Whether Glazova includes herself in this or is deliberately creating distance remains open to interpretation.

Arianne Vonmoos, Raise the Roof, 2026

For me, ‘Raise the Roof’ is one of the most powerful works in the exhibition. It depicts two black roses, with a hint of pink pigment; they touch one another and appear to be in motion. The motif is radically reduced, opening up a vast space for association. At times I interpret the green background as an oversized expanse of foliage, at others as a body of water – art history resonates within it. The longer I stand in front of the painting, the more I let myself drift. It is one of those works where it doesn’t even occur to me to take out my mobile phone. Vonmoos works with egg tempera she mixes herself and recycled materials such as old bed sheets. This unhurried way of working seems to be directly inscribed in the painting’s presence. The painting appears still, focused and full of life.

Stirnimann-Stojanovic, Carbon is Forever, 2026

At first glance, Stirnimann-Stojanovic’s work consists of printed A4 sheets in plastic folders. It is a climate certificate. Or is it? I’m unsure and open the exhibition brochure. Only then do I learn that the artists have used funds from the art world to purchase government CO₂ certificates and permanently withdrawn them from the market. The right to emit one tonne of CO₂ is thus effectively cancelled – that convinces me! Here, activism is not merely a motif, but becomes an artistic act in its own right. I do, however, question the understated nature of its presentation. Without the exhibition text, the work runs the risk of being overlooked. That would be a shame.

U5 (Berit Seidel & Stefanie Rubner), #flagged, 2020–2026

For #flagged, the U5 collective automatically took photographs of their own everyday lives every two seconds between 2007 and 2023. Since the server is no longer being maintained, this vast digital archive is slowly beginning to disappear. Individual images are printed on satin, painted over with neon colours and framed behind acrylic glass. As a result, they lose their documentary character and develop an original autonomy of their own. Particularly striking is an image in which the word ‘TRUST’ has been written directly above a CCTV camera. The work navigates the realms of memory, control, manipulation and transience, revealing just how dependent our seemingly immaterial visual worlds are on material infrastructures.

Samuel Haitz, Anthology (Proust, pp. 56–57), 2026

Four scans of the same double-page spread from different editions of a biography of Marcel Proust hang side by side. At first glance, they appear identical. Only upon closer inspection do small differences become apparent: aged paper, misaligned print rasters, signs of wear. Almost involuntarily, I find myself playing ‘Spot the Differences’ – and therein lies one of the subtleties of this work. Samuel Haitz employs a strategy that is as simple as it is effective to encourage his visitors to look more closely. The work rejects the fast-glance approach to art that is so widespread today; it quite clearly demands attention.

Cora Piantoni, Mille Donne, Mille Lotte (1,000 Women, 1,000 Struggles), 2025

On the upper floor, Cora Piantoni’s film immediately captivates me. It tells the story of the Tabacchine, the female tobacco workers who laboured in a Venetian factory until the 1990s and successfully organised themselves to secure better working conditions. The film is less concerned with historical events than with the women’s own experiences. One worker recounts the story of a colleague who, after the birth of her child, did not have enough milk to breastfeed. Another colleague then breastfed both her own child and that of the young mother. Such stories lend a great sense of immediacy to the political struggle. Solidarity is presented here not as an abstract demand, but as a lived reality, both in the workplace and in everyday life. The conversations are accompanied by workers’ songs that carry these memories forward.

Flavia Trachsler, On Cropped Plans and Unconstrained Scenes, 2026

Flavia Trachsler explores architectural structures as the foundations of social orders and deliberately contrasts these standardised models with ‘figures that do not fit’. I take great pleasure in this work. One sees bodies intertwining, supporting one another and playfully – indeed, almost passionately – experimenting with new forms of coexistence. The architecture remains unchanged. And yet one’s perspective shifts. What initially appears to be a model gradually becomes the stage for a narrative. It is not the built framework, but life-in-and-of-its-own-right that comes to the fore.

Caterina De Nicola, Of Self-Maintenance, 2026

The two photographs by Caterina De Nicola, both of the same size, depict the same situation, presumably taken just a few seconds apart and from slightly different angles. The work immediately captures my attention; it has a magnetic pull. It exudes something eerie, without its meaning becoming apparent. The photographs are part of the series *Of Self-Maintenance*, which explores processes of preservation, transformation and the conditions of artistic practice. On display are shelf-like or display-case-like structures in an interior space – perhaps a studio, perhaps an exhibition space. One cannot be quite sure. It seems as though an enigmatic, almost ritualistic process is taking place here. It is precisely this ambiguity and the unease it evokes that make the work so compelling. The photographs seem less like documentary images and more like objects that capture a moment in which something fundamental is changing. I linger for a long time in front of this work.

After the tour, I sit down, go through my notes and then read the jury reports. I’m pleased to see that there is a reasonable degree of overlap. I would have selected about half of the works in a similar way, and a third differently. Greater agreement would probably have made me suspicious.

My selection is probably less random than it might initially appear. Many of these works address the fundamental question: under what conditions do images, objects and actions appear to us as art today? The answers are surprisingly untheoretical and non-illustrative. Instead, they are developed through sensory, emotional and spatial means. The works in my selection insist that meaning does not arise solely from the image or the concept, but only through an encounter with material, space and the body. They do not seem to have been conceived primarily for social media such as Instagram (unlike other works in the space).

Last but not least, the works in my selection seem to want to elude our desire for clarity. Not everything is visible, can be explained or controlled. And it is with this feeling that I leave the Helmhaus with its strange purple floor.