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The

Artist

Nominated in
2025
By
Photo Elysée
Lives and Works in
Geneva, Switzerlan
Zoé Aubry (1993) develops a practice of critical, feminist, and experimental visual research through photography, within installations that unfold in space. Her work aims to reveal the mechanisms of visibility, and invisibility of dominant media narratives, notably through the use of poor images, inverting the logics of the attention economy. Holder of a Bachelor’s degree in Photography from ECAL - École cantonale d’art de Lausanne and a Master’s degree in Contemporary Artistic Practices from HEAD - Haute école d’art et de design de Genève, her book #Ingrid (2022), co-published by RVBBOOKS and Gato Negro Ediciones, was shortlisted for the Autor Book Award at the Rencontres d’Arles and won the Most Beautiful Swiss Books award. Her work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions, including « The Lure of the Image » at Fotomuseum Winterthur, «LES RESISTANTES» in Paris, « Concerned » at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, at the Musée des beaux-arts du Locle or in Arles, and several festivals including Athens Photo Festival, Biennale de l’image tangible Paris, Guernsey Photography Festival or Les Rencontres de la Photographie de Marrakech. She was the laureate of the Photographic Survey of the City of Geneva in 2021, and of the Swiss Federal Design Awards in 2018. Converging or in parallel, she fights within collective and associative projects and co-founds several initiatives where cultural work and political commitment meet to militate both towards utopias and direct field perspectives.
Projects
2023

NOMS INCONNUS_REPRODUCTION. SUTURE._#INGRID

Positioning themselves between a societal and media criticism, Zoé Aubry’s research-based projects are articulated around the problematic of visualization modes and the transformation of perception formats questioning uses and gestures relative to the erased names victims of systemic and structural murders. Damaged, the anti-pictures of which she makes use, act, activate, arm, suture, recompose themselves in a collective movement. Investigating macho, state and media violence, her approach is built on a relationship between societal phenomena and individual experiences, creating spaces of confrontation. The press clippings collected for UNKNOWN NAMES predominantly feature images showing the previous accomplices in these murders, as in most cases they were warned in advance : the police and justice authorities intervening at the scene of the crime after the fact. The result of a performative process of degradation and revenge, the prints undergo atrocities similar to those caused to the victims. Like ESTELLE VENEUT - BADR SMATI in the first serie, the works in REPRODUCTION. SUTURES. degrade themselves as they are shown. Within this project, a place is given to the victims made invisible by the Western re-appropriation of the term femicide by white feminists, who defined it according to their own reality by reducing it to conjugal murder cis hetero by a partner or ex-partner. #INGRID is a work that critically examines our digital attention economies and their effects. The work refers directly to the femicide of Ingrid Escamilla Vargas, a Mexican woman who was brutally murdered by her husband. Rejecting the voyeurism encouraged by photographs of violence published by the tabloid press, this project embodies the use of images as a popular and collective weapon. In a participatory gesture to make these macabre images disappear from the flow of social networks, Internet users all over the world massively posted photographs of peaceful lakes, sunsets and fields of flowers under the hashtag #IngridEscamillaVargas.
2023

NOMS INCONNUS_REPRODUCTION. SUTURE._#INGRID

Positioning themselves between a societal and media criticism, Zoé Aubry’s research-based projects are articulated around the problematic of visualization modes and the transformation of perception formats questioning uses and gestures relative to the erased names victims of systemic and structural murders. Damaged, the anti-pictures of which she makes use, act, activate, arm, suture, recompose themselves in a collective movement. Investigating macho, state and media violence, her approach is built on a relationship between societal phenomena and individual experiences, creating spaces of confrontation. The press clippings collected for UNKNOWN NAMES predominantly feature images showing the previous accomplices in these murders, as in most cases they were warned in advance : the police and justice authorities intervening at the scene of the crime after the fact. The result of a performative process of degradation and revenge, the prints undergo atrocities similar to those caused to the victims. Like ESTELLE VENEUT - BADR SMATI in the first serie, the works in REPRODUCTION. SUTURES. degrade themselves as they are shown. Within this project, a place is given to the victims made invisible by the Western re-appropriation of the term femicide by white feminists, who defined it according to their own reality by reducing it to conjugal murder cis hetero by a partner or ex-partner. #INGRID is a work that critically examines our digital attention economies and their effects. The work refers directly to the femicide of Ingrid Escamilla Vargas, a Mexican woman who was brutally murdered by her husband. Rejecting the voyeurism encouraged by photographs of violence published by the tabloid press, this project embodies the use of images as a popular and collective weapon. In a participatory gesture to make these macabre images disappear from the flow of social networks, Internet users all over the world massively posted photographs of peaceful lakes, sunsets and fields of flowers under the hashtag #IngridEscamillaVargas.
Zoé Aubry
was nominated by
Photo Elysée
in
2025
Show all projects
Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.