Team

Rosa Barba

Rosa Barba, Ph.D., is an artist and filmmaker who balances conceptualism with a distinctly personal vision in her work. She merges films, sculptures, installations, live performances, text pieces, and publications that are grounded in the material and conceptual qualities of cinema.

Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role in the perception of her work. She interrogates the industry of cinema with respect to various forms of staging by inviting the viewers to participate in her cultural observations. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative, and are indeterminately situated in time. They often focus on natural landscapes and human-made interventions into the environment and probe into the relationship of historical record, personal anecdote, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty, more legible as reassuring myth than the unstable reality they represent.

In 2021, Rosa Barba inaugurated Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage, 2021, a permanent open-air cinema sculpture and film in the United Nations Buffer Zone in Deryneia, Cyprus and Pillage of the Sea, a permanent sculpture in the sea in Ostend, for the Beaufort Biennial. Her work is part of numerous international collections and her recent and upcoming exhibitions include: Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2025), MALI Museum, Peru (2024), Center Pompidou, Paris (2023), Tate Modern, London (2023), Esther Schipper, Seoul, Korea (2023), PICA, Perth Australia (2023), Villa Medici, Rome (2022); New National Gallery, Berlin (2021-2022). She has been a visiting professor at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts and held a professorship in Fine Arts at the University of the Arts in Bremen.

Rosa Barba holds the Professorship for Art in Space and Time at the ETH Zurich.

Corinne Diserens

Corinne Diserens, Ph.D., is an art historian, curator, and head of collection at Hamburger Kunsthalle. From 1989 to 2009, she was curator at Institut Valencià d'Art Modern and at MACBA, Barcelona as well as director of Musées de Marseille, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, and Museion Bolzano. She curated Tyne International, Newcastle; Carta Blanca, Madrid/Bilbao; Big Social Game, Biennial Torino; the 25th Biennial Sao Paulo; and T.I.C.A.B. Tirana in 2009. From 2010 to 2017, she headed the art academy ERG Brussels, was jury president of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, and curator of the 2016 Taipei Biennial. From 2019 to 2023, she directed the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. Diserens curated numerous transdisciplinary exhibitions, artists retrospectives, publications, and seminars.

Nina Emge

Nina Emge is a Zürich-based artist, who reflects on the social dimensions of sound, voice, silence, and practices of listening. Emge’s work is centered around issues such as decentralization, shared working methods, and redistribution. This is evident in her installations and drawings, which reflect her research and archival work, as well as in the production processes of her artworks. Emge is an active member of the Transnational Sound Initiative. Emge’s works have been exhibited at institutions including Halle für Kunst in Lüneburg, Kunsthalle Zurich, Kunsthalle Bern, Istituto Svizzero Rome, Istituto Svizzero Milano, Frac Bretagne + Centre culturel suisse de Paris, Uferhalle Berlin, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Helmhaus Zurich, Haus Konstruktiv Zurich, and other national and international institutions.

Catherine Facerias

Catherine Facerias is an independent researcher and writer, trained as an urban anthropologist at Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Her work examines the modes of production of public space in a built-up environment and the agents involved in its production. Focusing, for instance, on the making of some major public squares in the city of Paris, her research observes the terms of access to any given public space and to the city in general, and analyses the conditions of existence of interstices and margins in the urban environment. She is currently working on a project of fiction about borderlands, and was recently commissioned to write a book on a 20th Century American photographer.

Heiner Franzen

Heiner Franzen is a draughtsman and video artist living in Berlin. After two years at the HfK Bremen, he completed his studies at the Berlin University of the Arts in 1993. He processes collective memories from everyday life: teenage experiences, movies, advertising, news, sports, medicine, etc. and puts them into large drawing and video installations such as most recently in the Haus am Lützowplatz, at the Manifesta Palermo and in the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. After visiting professorships at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin and the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts, he has been teaching at the ETH since 2018.

Sam Ghantous

Sam Ghantous works with the interrelationships between the built environment and the contemporary media that shapes and shares it. He often combines custom software with constructed artifacts. Recent exhibits include Postmasters Gallery, A83, ZKM at the Ludwig Museum, ASSAB One, OōEli Art Park, and YveYANG Gallery where he is represented. Sam has taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he also received his Master of Architecture.

Martin Hartung

Martin Hartung studied art history, anthropology, and theology at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. He worked on curatorial and publication projects at various art and cultural institutions, such as Dia Art Foundation, New York; Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein; Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Karlsruhe; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and recurrently as an advisor for the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage in Philadelphia. Martin is coordinator at the Chair of Art in Space and Time, for which he also conceives and manages special projects.

Nicole L’Huillier

Nicole L’Huillier, Ph.D., is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher from Santiago, Chile. Her practice centers on exploring sounds and vibrations as construction materials to delve into questions of agency, identity, collectivity, and the activation of a vibrational imagination. Her work materializes through installations, sonic/vibrational sculptures, custom-made (listening and/or sounding) apparatuses, performances, experimental compositions, membranal poems, and writing. She holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT (2022). Her work has been recently shown at Gropius Bau, Bienal de Artes Mediales, Transmediale, Sonic Acts, Kunsthalle Baden Baden, Ural Industrial Biennial, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC, Venice Architecture Biennale, and Ars Electronica, among others.

Sara Masüger

Sara Masüger is an artist who works with sculptures and large-scale installations. She studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and lives and works in Zurich. In her sculptures she explores memory as a process of distortion. Through direct imprints and deformations, she creates a fragile field of tension between recognizable bodily forms and amorphous landscapes as well as between visual and haptic perception.
Her work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including the Swedish National Museum, FRAC Auvergne, and Bündner Kunstmuseum. Since 2018, her installation Inn reverse has been on permanent display at the Muzeum Susch.

Monica Narula

Monica Narula is an artist and curator based between Zurich, Paris, and New Delhi. She holds a BA in English Literature. Her postgraduate training is in cinematography and filmmaking – leading to a deep interest in the fantasy of the image. Alongside Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Narula is co-founder and member of the Raqs Media Collective. Founded in 1992, the collective has curated exhibitions, made films, edited books, staged situations, and collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers, curators, and theatre directors. Their works have been presented internationally at most major scenarios, from documenta to the Venice Biennale, as well as solo museum exhibitions. Raqs have curated large scale exhibitions such as the Shanghai Biennale and In the Open or in Stealth at MACBA, Barcelona. They co-founded Sarai—the inter-disciplinary and incubatory space at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi—in 2001, where they initiated processes that have left deep impact on contemporary culture in India, and where they also edited the Sarai Reader series (2001-2009).

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira, Ph.D., teaches Visual Culture, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. He received his Ph.D. in Literature Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais – UFMG (Brazil) and École Normale Supérieure – ENS, Paris. He was a researcher at the Center for History and Art Theory – CEHTA, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales – EHESS, Paris (2014-2016); Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte DFK, Paris (2022); and Max Planck Institute, Rome (2022). His is the author of the books Invented Skins – epidermal readings in Brazilian Art and Literature (2023); Beschweigen, Bezeichnen: Mira Schendel und die Schrift unmittelbaren Erlebens (2020); A invenção de uma pele: Nuno Ramos em obras (2018).

Jonathan Pouthier

Jonathan Pouthier is in charge of programming the film collection at the Musée National d'Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou in Paris since 2011. He is the author of numerous articles on the relationship between film and the visual arts, including Objet mental. Film, projection et interférences (in Philippe Decrauzat, Delay, Walther König, 2022), David Claerbout. The Silence of the Lens (Hannibal Books, 2022), and L'histoire d'une histoire du cinéma (Paris Expérimental/Centre Pompidou, 2023, co-edited with Enrico Camporesi). He has curated several exhibitions, including The Site of Film (KANAL-Centre Pompidou Brussels, 2018), Ericka Beckman (KANAL-Centre Pompidou Brussels, 2019), Jean Pierre Bertrand, Diamon'd (Centre Pompidou Paris, 2019) and more recently Le reste est ombre. Pedro Costa, Rui Chafes, Paulo Nozolino (Centre Pompidou, 2022, co-curated by Philippe-Alain Michaud).

Nicolas Rolle

Nicolas Rolle is a photographer and urban researcher based in Zurich, where he completed his Master of Architecture at ETH. In his research focus on architectural care through collaborative and active maintenance, the gardener plays a central role in the development and transformation of cities. While conceiving and conducting seminars in the field of photographic and post-media research at ETH, Nicolas participated in various exhibitions in Berlin, Bolzano, Seoul and Zurich as well as in the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017), the Ornamenta Transferium in Pforzheim (2022), and the Swiss contribution to the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale (2023). His photographic work has been published by Park Books, Hatje Cantz Verlag and Arch+, among others.

Student Assistants

Defne Çetinkaya
Shriya Chaudhry
Lisa Gärtner
Elena Geser
Gina Mildner
Meret Pfiffner
Mona Siessegger
Kaspar Stengele
Sacha Toupance

Formerly

Laura Berther
Ramona Köchli
Paula Schaufelbühl
Daryl Thai