Opening on July 2nd from 6pm to 9pm, on the occasion of Nuit des Bains.
Xippas Geneva is pleased to present an exhibition bringing together Chloé Delarue, Miriam Laura Leonardi and Gaia Vincensini, curated by Manuella Denogent.
Through three distinct artistic practices, encompassing sculpture, installation, photography, video, objects, light-based devices and interventions in space, the exhibition offers a critical perspective on the systems of representation, value and desire that shape contemporary society. Each artist, through a highly singular formal language, questions the images, objects, signs and materials that structure our relationship to the world: what we look at, what we consume, what we fetishise, and what we project onto things.
Rather than constructing a single thematic narrative, the exhibition brings into dialogue three practices that share a close attention to the mechanisms through which the visible is produced. In the work of Gaia Vincensini, Chloé Delarue and Miriam Laura Leonardi, forms are never neutral. They circulate, seduce, reproduce themselves, become automated, are bought and sold, and take on symbolic or economic value, sometimes to the point of becoming symptoms of an era. By bringing together these three artists connected to the Swiss contemporary scene, Xippas Geneva proposes a sensitive and critical reading of practices that approach the present not as a mere backdrop, but as a system of signs to be deciphered.
In Gaia Vincensini’s work, forms circulate between economy, ornament, symbolic power and fiction. Her practice questions the notion of value, not as something fixed, but as a social, affective and speculative construction. Through sculpture, ceramics, prints, textiles and video, the artist summons the imaginaries of banking, insurance, luxury, cosmetics, accessories and signs of possession. These worlds become allegorical spaces, traversed by secret narratives, ambiguous symbols and rituals of protection or belonging. Following her solo exhibition Assurance sinistre at La Graineterie, the art centre of the City of Houilles, and her recognition as a laureate of the Swiss Art Awards 2026, her presence in the exhibition firmly anchors the project in the current Swiss contemporary art scene.
Chloé Delarue develops, under the acronym TAFAA, Toward A Fully Automated Appearance, a body of work that questions the automation of forms, affects and environments. Her installations bring together industrial materials, technological components, neon, resin, organic or plant-like elements, in arrangements that evoke both science fiction and the remnants of a world in transformation. Her work does not celebrate technological progress; rather, it reveals its tensions, residues, areas of opacity and possible disruptions. Winner of the competition for a permanent artwork at the Saint-Antoine Archaeological Site in Geneva, to be inaugurated on 5 September 2026, Chloé Delarue’s practice is currently gaining significant institutional recognition.
Miriam Laura Leonardi, for her part, situates her work within a conceptual, self-referential and often ironic approach, bringing together photography, video, performance, objects and interventions in public space. Drawing from visual culture, cinema, literature and art history, she shifts existing codes in order to reveal their political, social and feminist subtexts. Language, appropriation, quotation and staging become, in her work, tools of analysis as much as forms of disturbance. In 2026, she represents Switzerland at the Swiss Pavilion of the Venice Biennale as part of a collective project.
The exhibition thus takes stock of a moment in which the images, objects and devices that surround us no longer belong solely to the realm of representation. They produce narratives, activate desires, and organise forms of belonging, control or projection. Between value and appearance, automation and fiction, visual culture and social critique, Gaia Vincensini, Chloé Delarue and Miriam Laura Leonardi compose a set of practices that reveal the tensions of a present traversed by its own signs.
