Artists & Network
Network connector
Projects index
Members directory
FUTURES FOUNDATION
About
Curatorial services
Residency program
Contact
Events
Shop
login
Log out
Log in
Need help?
Dashboard
News & socials
Newsroom
Stories
Instagram
LinkedIn
Edit profile
The

Artist

InstagramLinkedInWebsiteE-mail

/

Photographer

/

Visual Artist

Sebastian Stadler

Nominated in
2026
By
Centre de la photographie Genève
Lives and Works in
Zurich
Sebastian Stadler is a Swiss-Finnish artist based in Zurich, Switzerland who works with photography, video and text. He studied photography at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and the Lausanne University of the Arts (ECAL). His work has been exhibited in national and international exhibitions, including at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Photoforum Pasquart, Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Kunsthaus Baselland, Centre de la photographie Genève, Haus Konstruktiv Zürich, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and the gallery Heinzer Reszler in Lausanne. In 2013, Sebastian Stadler received the Swiss Art Award, and in 2019 the Manor Art Prize St. Gallen. In 2021, his first monograph, A Close Up of a Large Rock, I Think, was published by Kodoji Press and was selected as one of the Most Beautiful Swiss Books. His work is part of several important public and private art collections, including Vontobel Art Collection, UBS Kulturstiftung, Maus Frères SA Collection, Geneva, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Kanton Zürich, Kanton Thurgau, Kanton St. Gallen and Julius Bär Art Collection.
Projects
2025

New Archeologies

In his work New Archeologies, Sebastian Stadler uses a generative model to create images of measuring charts, color scales, and reference grids: tools used in reproduction photography – or for scientific purposes – to represent something measurable in an image. At first glance, these generated and represented tools appear usable, but in their concrete application, they prove obsolete. They escape any real function, as they do not exist in this form in reality. The AI uses symbols and codes from the corresponding image database and recomposes them. Through the techniques of double exposure and collages on negative and positive film, these become part of photographs taken with the camera. In this context, the instruments reflect not only the rational perception of reality, but also the desire for control, salvation and clarity in a chaotic world. 'The world is number': this idea runs through the project as a fundamental motif and refers to the link between abstraction and deep understanding. Opposite this, we perhaps find the motif of organic nature and the desire for an undefined place of origin. The frames of New Archeologies are made of welded and polished aluminium parts and glass. The frames were developed and produced by the artist for this series.
Show full project
Sebastian Stadler
was nominated by
Centre de la photographie Genève
in
2026
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.

Marco Frauchiger and Sebastian Stadler have been selected by Centre de la photographie Genève (CPG) for their projects researching, and experimenting with, the significations and significance of photography, two nominations that resonate with the bicentennial of photography celebrated in 2026–2027. Through complex and layered processes, their respective work explores, questions, challenges and pushes to their limits, equally visually and conceptually, the ways in which we rely on photography to make sense of the world, of history, and of our place within the world. 

‍

While Marco Frauchiger and Sebastian Stadler have been exhibited internationally in recent years, CPG aims with their nomination to FUTURES to bring an increased visibility to their work at the international level, and hopes that new opportunities to develop and circulate their work will arise from their integration in the network.

‍

Marco Frauchiger presents The War Movie, an imageless video listing all wars that happened since the industrialisation of warfare and up to October 2025, and Camera Obscura Type III, for which he built a large format camera from aircraft debris collected in Laos, which he then used to photograph crash sites in Laos from the Secret War (1964–1973) as well as the Swiss industrial sites where the aircraft had been produced. 

‍

Sebastian Stadler presents New Archeologies, a series exploring our desire for control and clarity and echoing how photography has been harnessed to observe and measure the world, through double exposure where AI-generated charts, scales and grids are superimposed on negative images of nature and human forms. 

‍

‍

‍

Related artists
More artists that you might
like to explore
All artists
/
Photographer
/
Visual Artist
/
Art Director
Johanna Hullár
Johanna Hullár is a Zurich-based visual artist working with photography, video installations and timebased sculptures. She graduated from the HTW Berlin with a degree in communication design and holds a master’s degree in photography from ECAL, University of Art and Design Lausanne. Hullár’s practice explores themes of connection, materiality, time and perception. She investigates new ways of mixing still and moving images, playing with notions of surreality and reality, and generated objects to reflect on possible futures and the interaction of (wo)man-made and natural materials, presented through a humorous and feminine prism. Hullár’s transdisciplinary approach opens up new visual spaces, offering visitors a sensory experience with sculptural arrangements frozen in ice, constantly in motion and changing state. Laureate of the Swiss Design Awards 2024 and Prix de l’ECAL 2020, and nominee for the Prix Mobilière 2024, Hullár made her institutional debut at Kunsthalle Mannheim in 2021, followed by the solo shows Floral Landscape (2021), Burning Desires (2022) and Material Landscape (2023) held in Zurich. She has exhibited internationally, including at Swiss House Milano (2022), Jungkunst Winterthur (2021), Tokyo Photographic Research (2019), Biennale dell’Immagine Chiasso (2019) and Paris Photo (2018). In 2023, she was resident at La Becque artist residency and in 2025 at Plateforme 10 x Fiminco Fondation in Paris.
/
Photographer
/
Visual Artist
/
Film Director
Igor Schiller
Igor Shiller (1996) is a Serbia-born, Amsterdam-based visual artist who graduated with a degree in photography from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in 2021. The following year, he was nominated for the FOAM Paul Huf Award. His work has been showcased at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Unfair Amsterdam and the EYE Film Museum, among others. In 2024, he received the Mangelos Award, honoring him as Serbia’s best young visual artist.Schiller’s artistic practice explores the lasting imprint of childhood, drawing inspiration from memories and his Balkan roots. Through photography, film, and set design, he transforms family archive into uncanny dreamscapes saturated with tenderness and warmth. Embracing play as both method and subject, he turns toys, lullabies, and games into historical artifacts that reveal how tradition and upbringing shape and perpetuate rigid systems. As colors grow richer and characters take form, the line between remembering and reinventing begins to blur. What started as a search for fragments of memory became an unfolding tale of identity and belonging.
/
Photographer
/
Visual Artist
/
Researcher
Thi My Lien Nguyen
Thi My Lien Nguyen (b. 1995) is a Swiss-Vietnamese photographer and artist based in Switzerland. She received her Bachelor's degree in Camera Arts from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in 2017. In her artistic practice she deals with the feeling and understanding of belonging, participation and the sense of home, whereas she is strongly interested in diasporic and post-migrant realities and stories. Through participatory and inclusive methods, performative and culinary activations she seeks to establish more inclusive spaces to create more understanding and representations between communities. She works with traditions, rituals, folklore, photography and food. Her work has been exhibited in multiple exhibitions including the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil in São Paulo (2023), Museum Haus Konstruktiv Zürich (2023), Plat(t)form, Fotomuseum Winterthur (2022), Photo Hanoi, Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (VCCA) (2021). Nguyen is part of the curatorial team at Les Complices*, a self-organised community-based off-space in Zurich, committed to support the ideas and works of queer, trans, inter, non-binary, women* and BIPoC.‍
/
Photographer
/
Visual Artist
/
Educator
Paula Artés
Paula Artés (1996) is an artist committed to unveiling and questioning hidden spaces of power—and, by extension, control. Through rigorous prior research, she brings these spaces to light. Her work has been exhibited at Museu Habitat, curated by Manuel J. Borja-Villel; Santa Mònica in Barcelona; Lo Pati in Amposta; the Museu Morera; and the Festival de la Imagen in Colombia. She won the ArtNou Award for Best Exhibition at àngels barcelona gallery. Her work is part of the Mapfre Foundation collection and the Contemporary Art Collection of the Generalitat de Catalunya. She has been selected for PhotoEspaña Descubrimientos, Sala d’Art Jove, VEGAP, OSIC, and Unseen Amsterdam. She has also been nominated for the Gabriele Basilico Prize, the C/O Berlin Talent Award, the MAST Foundation Prize, and the Pla(t)form Prize at FotoMuseum. Additionally, she has participated in residencies at HISK in Belgium and Baladre at Lo Pati.
/
Photographer
/
Visual Artist
Claudia Amatruda
Claudia Amatruda (1995, Foggia, IT) is a visual artist living and working in Bologna, IT. Her work focuses on the representation of the body through photography, video performances and installations, addressing social issues such as disability and with particular attention to the creative process, supported by research on scientific and literary texts. In 2019 she published the photographic book "Naiade", presented through lectures in Italian schools and festivals to raise awareness on the topic of invisible diseases. From 2021 to the present her project "When you hear hoofbeats think of horses, not zebras" is exhibited in Italy, Greece, France, Holland and England. In 2022 she won the Special Mention for the Emerging Photography section of the Francesco Fabbri Prize. According to Il Giornale dell'Arte she is among the 30 artists under 30 in 2023 and produced NFT works during a PhotoVogue x Voice.com Art Residency. In 2024 she exhibited her project "Good Use of my Bad Health" at the Fotografia Europea Festival in Reggio Emilia, winning the ‘Nuove Traiettorie’ mention of the Luigi Ghirri Prize: an art residency and solo exhibition at the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm in May 2025. This year she will release her new photography book published by RVM HUB.
/
Photographer
/
Visual Artist
/
Researcher
Jéssica Pereira Gaspar

Jéssica Pereira Gaspar is a Portuguese transdisciplinary artist, born in Coimbra in 1996. She began her academic journey in sciences and technologies, which profoundly influenced her methodology, research focus, and creative practice. She earned her Bachelor's degree in Visual Arts from Universidade Lusófona de Lisboa and her Master's degree in Visual Arts from Escola Superior de Artes e Design das Caldas da Rainha.Currently, she is pursuing a PhD in Science and Technology of the Arts at the Catholic University of Porto, where she is developing research on interfaces for interspecies communication and artistic co-creation with different organisms.Her practice centers on interactions with other-than-human entities and their dynamic agency, seeking to unravel the intricate relationships between living organisms and matter. By integrating multiple mediums such as image, video, sound, and organic materials as catalysts for immersive experiences, her work creates a space for reflection on the interconnectedness of all entities. In 2022, she was awarded a scholarship for an art residency at RAMA, where she developed the solo exhibition Spectacular Instability. She also participated in Zonas deTransição (2023), a project by the PLMJ Foundation, showcasing Transmutations II, a piece later included in the foundation's collection. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions such as A Certain Practice of Attention (2023) and the XXII Biennial of Cerveira (2022). In 2024, her work was included in the Portuguese Emerging Art book, the Millennium BCP Young Art Award from which she was awarded the Portuguese Serigraphy Center Award.In 2025, she was one of the five artists to be selected to represent Porto and Ci.clo Platform in Futures Photography Festival of 2025.

/
Photographer
/
Visual Artist
Ana Cristina Irian
Ana-Cristina IRIAN is a visual arts researcher, curator, and research-based artist who works with collections, photo archives, and multimedia materials. She studied sociology (Trento&Regensburg) and visual anthropology (Bucharest&Perugia). She holds a PhD in visual arts at UNARTE. Her artistic practice is developed under the motto No one left behind. It consists of the production of photo-objects and working with marginal/hidden objects and photographs, together with research materials transformed into photo-video installations reflecting the life of unknown people. Cristina participated in over 35 exhibitions in Romania and abroad, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Portugal, and Hungary. Cristina's recent projects focus on interpreting memory objects and integrating photographic material into contemporary spaces through visual installations. Notable displays include her contribution to Fragmentum at Palatele Brâncovenești and Here they lived at Carol 53 and the International Visual Art Biennale Brașov (2021, 2023). Cristina has published studies in Anthropology of East Europe Review, Indiana University; History of Communism in Europe, IICCMER; Studies and History Articles, Romanian Society of Historical Sciences; Romanian Contemporary Photography Influx; Revelar, Universidade do Porto. She is also the author of "Photographic collections and archives today, in the digital world," published by Tritonic.
/
Photographer
/
Visual Artist
Nazlı Yıldırım
Nazlı Yıldırım was born in Ankara and is living in Ireland. She studied at Istanbul University Faculty of Letters. After teaching for a while, she worked as an editor in the publishing industry. Nazlı’s articles have been published in various magazines, newspapers and online platforms in Greece, Belgium and Turkey. Nazlı released her first photo fanzine called Hayret. Her creative journey involves documenting the impact of factors like class, culture, gender, sexual identity, and family dynamics on societies. Through the lens of her own life, she delves into subjects such as gender, cultural identity, discrimination, and the experiences of LGBTI+ communities.
/
Photographer
/
Visual Artist
Minh Ngoc Nguyen
Minh Ngọc Nguyễn (b. 1992) holds an MFA in Photography from HDK-Valand in Gothenburg and a BA in Visual Communication from the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Copenhagen. Working primarily with staged still-life photography, Nguyễn approaches the medium as both a visual practice and a cultural system, examining how images produce, circulate, and stabilise meanings of identity, desire, and representation. Minh lives and works in Copenhagen.
/
Photographer
Katarina Radović

Katarina Radović was born in Belgrade, Serbia. She studied History of Art at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK in the 1990’s and later acquired the BA Degree in Photography from the Academy of Arts ‘BK’ in Belgrade in 2006. 

As a free-lance artist, she has participated in a number of solo and group exhibitions and festivals in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Spain, The Netherlands, France, Malta, Egypt, Japan, Senegal, USA, Israel, etc. 

She received the Kultur Kontakt artist-in-residence grant in Vienna, Austria, in 2007; the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) grant for the project Until Death Do Us Part in 2009; and the artist-in-residence grant from the Fondazzjoni Kreattività in Malta in 2019. She also received a grant for attending a specialised course in photography at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria, in 2020.

Related professionals
Other professionals that might be interesting
All professionals
Salvatore Vitale
Salvatore Vitale (b. 1986, Palermo, Italy) is a Swiss-based artist, director, and professor whose work explores the complexity of contemporary societies. Using expanded and speculative storytelling through mixed media techniques, he focuses on the politics of systems that regulate modernity and the impact of technological transformations. Vitale is the Artistic Director of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival and FUTURES Photography, both international platforms dedicated to contemporary photography. He also serves as a Professor at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, where he leads the Transmedia Storytelling Programme. Previously, he was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of YET magazine, an international photography publication. Vitale’s work has received international awards. It is featured in several public and private collections and has been widely exhibited in museums and at festivals worldwide.
Angel Luis Gonzalez Fernandez
Ángel Luis González Fernández is a designer, artist, and curator supporting engaging visual arts practices, winner of Business to Arts David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Awards 2011. His work manifests through PhotoIreland, which he founded in 2010 to stimulate a critical dialogue on Photography. He devises curatorial projects placing conversations in the public realm around visual culture, critical thinking. These include events (PhotoIreland Festival, Halftone Print Fair, arts residency How to Flatten a Mountain, and New Irish Works), a cultural hub (The Library Project: Ireland’s Art bookshop, host to a unique resource library of photobooks and a productive arts programme), publishing projects that distribute inexpensive access to local practices, research projects (Critical Academy: examining contemporary art practices). He works collaboratively with a growing network of organisations, noticeably through ambitious Creative Europe partnerships. During the Summer 2020 lockdown he launched the critical publication OVER Journal, now distributed globally. He received the Arts Council of Ireland’s Visual Arts Bursary to deepen research on the broad historical and specific artistic context of Photography in Ireland, to curate an ambitious survey exhibition in PhotoIreland Festival 2022 and to publish a series of publications on the matter. He regularly contributes to publications such as the forthcoming The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies, edited by Lucy Soutter, Duncan Wooldridge. See some of his Graphic and Web Design work in the 100 Design Archive.
Iveta Gabalina
Iveta Gabaliņa (1979) is a curator, artist and educator. She has studied photography at the studio of Andrejs Grants, at Bournemouth Art Institute, and in the MA programme at Alto University in Helsinki. Her work has been exhibited in Latvia and internationally, including at C/O (Berlin, Germany), GESTE (Paris), and Williams Tower Gallery (Houston, USA). Gabaliņa has participated in photography festivals in Singapore, Hanover, and elsewhere. Her work is included in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Geste Paris, and the Deutsche Börse Art Collection. Since 2008 she has been part of ISSP team, responsible for numerous educational and curatorial projects. In 2018 she founded ISSP Gallery - an exhibition space dedicated to contemporary photography.
Sebastian Vaida
I’ve always loved photography, even if it sounds like a cliche. The first photos I took, I did without knowing how to do that, without paying any attention to framing, subject or composition. After a while, I began to understand what is happening in the space between me as a photographer and the subject I was photographing. And many years later, I also understood why I love to photograph. To communicate. A message, a concept, an emotion.
Newsletter