Giulia Essyad

Giulia Essyad (born 1992 in Lausanne) is a Swiss multi-disciplinary artist, poet and performer. Her work includes photography, video, language and performance. Focused on the representation of the body and otherness, her works make use of numerous female figures, both imaginary and real.
Giulia Essyad uses her body as a raw material and a space of projection, which she immerses in a fantastic cinematic universe reminiscent of medieval legends and pop culture. She makes use of a sensibility soaked up the codes of ultra-femininity, between an uninhibited self-assertion and an invitation to the critical deconstruction of the representation of the contemporary body. Between historical hijacking and provocation, her body becomes a militant, iconic vector, which she plunges into dreamlike universes, freeing her image from the taboos and criteria that continue to confine women to the aesthetic canons which still prevail in our society. In a very free syncretism, she summons notions that extend from animism to polytheism, from the world of fairies to that of Fantasy, which is inspired by both natural and supernatural phenomena, by myths and by more traditional and ancient beliefs, in a very broad and multicultural field, or in the more contemporary field of hybrid, archaic and digital beings. Giulia Essyad creates small characters sort of fairies, dolls, or toys, which resemble her and oscillate between an amused, claimed animality and a sophistication that would make Ann Lee or Betty Boop digital or Hollywood sisters, between the ancient nymph and the modern undine, transformed into a warrior, as the figure of a liberated body breaking the codes of classic beauty and imposed norms.