Pro Helvetia Shanghai is pleased to congratulate and announce the final selection of Residencies 2024. We are thrilled to have received a competitive listing of proposals. After undergoing a joint discussion with our colleagues in Switzerland, we have chosen the following seven candidates, who will be granted our support to realize their proposals in 2024. We wish them a fruitful exchange set to gain inspiration, establish networks and generate new projects.
Selected artists from Switzerland:
Anna Diehl | Visual arts
Country of residency: China
Based in Basel.
Anna Diehl’s work develops in the tension between abstraction and figuration, subjective experience, and its social context. She is interested in the discourses around themes such as power, violence, identity, and also vulnerability and intimacy.
The residency at the Shanghai Museum of Glass (SMOG) will be a great opportunity to immerse herself in working with the material and to learn about its processing. Thrown into a different symbolic order, she is fascinated to compare the power relations and identity discourses in Shanghai with the ones she knows.
Jeronim Horvat | Visual arts
Country of residency: China
Based in Basel.
Jeronim Horvat works with sculpture, painting and installation. His works deal with the observation and analysis of economic and market events, the social anchoring of mythology and the contrasts we encounter in everyday life.
He’d like to explore Shanghai as a site of economic exchange and financial innovation. He also intends to engage with its dynamic art scene, through exchanging ideas with local artists and cultural institutions, visiting local workshops, and producing new sculptures.
Valentin Rilliet | Visual arts
Country of residency: China
Based in Zurich.
Valentin Rilliet’s main artistic practice focuses on painting. His work manifests visual studies of mythologies, popular tales, symbolism and historical events. By combining fictional and documentary, he articulates a dialogue on the canvas as a method to deconstruct, collect and contemplate the multiplicity of interpretations over his cultural references.
In China, he will explore the contradictions and visual exchanges between his Eastern upbringing and the Western artistic legacy. Through interacting with the local art communities and collectives, he hopes to initiate discussions on the question of transculturality.
Selected artists from the region:
33EMYBW | Music, Interdisciplinary
Country of residency: Switzerland
Based in Shanghai.
The producer 33EMYBW’s works flow in the raptures among liminal worlds and sci-fi mediums, excavating biological myths from ancient dreams and ancestral wisdom. Influenced by modern dance music, world music and visual art, her music is often considered to be a combination of highly personalized low-frequency grooves and exciting sound designs.
From 2016 to 2019, she carried out a project to redisplay the culture of the Dong ethnic group in southwest China. In Switzerland, she hopes to expand the field recording collection of her ongoing sound work called “Mandala” which started in Lhasa, exploring the relationship between human beings and nature.
Jiao Dongzi | Visual arts
Country of residency: Switzerland
Based in Tianjin.
Jiao Dongzi has participated in photography festivals and exhibitions at home and abroad, and is the initiator of “We Are Together” and “Image Bridge” public welfare photography projects.
Jiao’s photographic works focus on rural China, and make repeated and detailed observations of farmers and female groups. In the form of images and texts, she tries to reflect on her own origin and settle the confusion.
Her residency project “Native Born” is a continuation of the “Father’s Village” project she started filming in 2018. This project reveals the plight, struggle, and compromise of farmers in the torrent of urbanization in Switzerland, a place with drastically different economic backgrounds.
Zhang Wenxin | Visual arts
Country of residency: Switzerland
Based in Hangzhou.
Zhang Wenxin sees herself as a terrain builder, who simulates the intricate terrain between human and non-human minds. She uses images, films, installations, and soundscapes to bring forth perceptual journeys.
Switzerland and Guizhou Province, where she works, are analogous. Both places are rich with mountains and karst landscapes, and have recently become sanctuaries for Science and Technology Infrastructures.
Following the traces of geological and technological forces, she will take on journeys in the Jura mountains and dive into the polymorphic time that resonates with underground rivers, archeological sites, bunkers dating back to WWI, as well as underground scientific labs, and render the journey into a speculative video essay.
Payne Zhu | Visual arts
Country of residency: Switzerland
Based in Shanghai.
Payne Zhu probes into different economic systems and works in between the rheology of finance, competing bodies and the flooding of images, striving to create alternative economics. Taking unconventional moving images as a point of departure, Zhu’s works celebrate the unmatchable nature of the subject through the mismatch of different technological media.
Different from all other financial centers that highly refer to liquidity according to their geographical location, Zurich offers a sense of stability and security. How do Switzerland’s geographical features and lingual expressions interact with the financial industry to create such a special financial spectacle? He hopes to explore Zurich’s financial industry, geographical features and lingual expressions to find Switzerland’s floating and fixed rate.
A Guide to Residency Partners in China
This brochure will guide you through the various residency programs in different corners of China that will inspire and challenge you as an artist.
Learn everything you need to know about being a residency artist in China:
- Navigate through the map of host partners
- Get an overview of residency programs throughout China
- Check out interviews and resources provided by partners
More on Residencies
Application deadline for residencies: 1 March 2024
Discover all residency opportunities under Find Support.