Award Winners

Lukas Truniger

Lukas Truniger creates environments: he works with systems and foregrounds processes, building places to be inhabited. In his worlds, artificial and technological approaches model and mimic natural states. By reproducing clouds in his installation Ethereal Fleeting (2018), or by transposing a network of light rays from a virtual space to a physical one in Latent Realities (2019), Truniger reveals hidden infrastructures and explores the interwoven relationship between synthetic and natural environments. Truniger’s installations invite viewers to step inside these systems, encouraging reflection on how we perceive, represent, and translate complex processes. His poetic spaces emerge through a critical exploration and deconstruction of music, sound, image, and representation.

Truniger’s practice is grounded in his background in music and sound art, as well as the traditions of generative and media art. He designs systems with defined rules, only to step aside and let them unfold – allowing processes to perform and evolve autonomously. This is perhaps most powerfully expressed in Overgrown (2023), where Truniger reclaims obsolete crypto-mining hardware, repurposing its computational power for volunteer science initiatives. The project not only comments on the larger infrastructure that underpins digital data, energy consumption and power needs required by crypto-currencies and machine learning systems, but also actively reduces – however modestly – our planetary existence risks.

The jury was deeply impressed by Truniger’s consistent and nuanced articulation of the poetics and politics embedded in his work. His exploration of the interwoven realms of the artificial and the natural speaks directly to the complexities of contemporary life. With this award, we recognise not only the strength and coherence of his artistic practice to date, but also the critical role that generative and media arts play in navigating and making sense of the intricate systems that shape our world.

Awards and Grants

2024 Lumen-Preis, London | 2016 nominiert für den Prix Cube, Paris | 2015 RUNWAY-Preis von Bipolar, Montpellier

Selected Exhibitions and Festivals

Isabell Bullerschen

Isabell Bullerschen explores fluid concepts of posthuman corporeality, intelligence, and identity. She dissolves or renders permeable traditional categories of thought, abandoning the anthropocentric perspective in favour of speculative narration. Her immersive mixed-media installations exist simultaneously in both physical and digital realms.

Slime has been a recurring motif in Bullerschen’s work for some time. As a protagonist, it is not only a biological substance but also a multifaceted metaphor for the connectivity between major existential themes: In the three-part installation Phlegm (2024), slime visualises the connections between birth and death, metabolism and transformation. It manifests itself in two portals, where Bullerschen assembles collages using photographs of placentas and fungi, further reworking them with an image-transforming AI. Alongside, she presents a text accessible via QR code, discussing slime’s crucial role in the emergence and dissolution of life, as well as the ambivalent emotions associated with it: “Everything is metabolism, and real life is first and foremost slimy. The material of liminality. The material of ambivalence.”

Already in her expansive project ipseria (2022–present), she propagated an invented entity: a fluid, ever-evolving life form inspired by invertebrates and eukaryotes. This fictional, non-human intelligence is an organism that learns, remembers, and makes decisions without a brain, ultimately serving as a canvas for Bullerschen’s reflections on artistic forms of knowledge transmission. For her modular, hybrid installations, Bullerschen employs a distinctive technique. Initially, she uses non-digital tools, modelling with clay, latex, pigment, agar-agar, or glycerine, combining these forms with found or cultivated materials. Only afterwards are these elements digitised using 3D scans. This process highlights the importance she places on connecting manually created corporeality with digitally constructed representation – particularly in the merging of these two poles. Depending on the context, the results are immersive, multisensory installations consisting of wall-spanning images, VR realisations, voluminous fabric forms, aromas, and soundtracks. Isabell Bullerschen impresses with the way she translates her posthumanist ideas into opulent displays that allow us to experience the overlay of the digital and the corporeal not only intellectually but also sensually.

Awards and Grants

Selected Exhibitions and Festivals

Rhona Mühlebach

Rhona Mühlebach’s installations conjure idiosyncratic realities in which memory and imagination are indistinguishable. Her worlds are populated by figures such as Neanderthals, wild boars, and slime moulds, who either comment on civilisation or appear as creator beings. Reality becomes pliable, language malleable, and failure – both human and narrative – drives insight. Mühlebach inhabits the question of the relationship between reality and fiction in every image. These shifts in perspective run throughout the oeuvre of the artist, who was born in Thurgau and now lives in Vienna. History becomes timeless matter, animals become protagonists, and humour emerges as a method of gaining knowledge. Her narratives refuse linear time and unfold along poetic trajectories where language, music, and technology are tightly interwoven.

In Ditch Me (2023), an inconspicuous ditch – once a Roman frontier – becomes the stage for a multilayered gathering: soldiers, slime moulds, avatars, and parasites traverse different eras. Similarly, in Excitement is not part of my feeling repertoire (2021), animals, Neanderthals, and modern humans encounter one another in a world slowly disintegrating beyond the comfort of empathy. In her recent works, Mühlebach increasingly employs CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery) and probes its points of rupture. Particularly in transferring real faces onto avatars, disconcerting moments arise, exposing the fragility of media image production. This deliberate entanglement of sci-fi and history is characteristic of her artistic signature. Her films are not consumer goods but open narrative spaces: digital and real bodies interact, voices contradict one another, and the human becomes an open question. With humour, seriousness, and an experimental visual language, she creates worlds that challenge both thought and emotion.

Awards and Grants

2024 Co-Creation Grant with Chloë Reid, Pro Helvetia Johannesburg | 2023 Produktionsbeitrag (Ditch Me) Kulturstiftung des Kantons Thurgau | 2021 Adolf Dietrich Förderpreis, Thurgau | 2020 Commission, Travelling Gallery Scotland | 2019 Project Fund (Loch Long), Hope Scott Trust | 2017 Förderpreis für Kunst und Wissenschaft, PMS Kreuzlingen | 2015 Best short movie, International Film Festival Cairo | 2014 Premio Action Light for the Best Swiss Newcomer, Festival del Film Locarno | 2014 Nachwuchspreis SUIS-SIMAGE / SSA, Solothurner Filmtage

Selected Exhibitions and Festivals