Fine Arts | MAFine Arts | MA

In a first round of judging in February 2024, the jury selected 17 artists from 146 applications who were invited to exhibit at the Swiss Art Awards in Basel. In the second round, 7 young artists from these nominations were honoured with the Kiefer Hablitzel | Göhner Art Prize 2024 worth 15,000 Swiss francs, including MA Fine Arts alumnus Leevi Toija. 

Monster Chetwynd, who teaches in the Department of Fine Arts, was honoured with a Swiss Art Award worth 25,000 Swiss francs.

The prizewinners' works can be seen from 11 to 16 June at the Swiss Art Awards 2024 exhibitions in Hall 1.1 of Messe Basel.

In 2023, Leevi Toija has been honoured with the ZHdK Sponsorship Award. During his master's degree at the ZHdK, he received an excellence scholarship from the Fondation ZHdK.

Adelita Husni-Bey is an Libyan-Italian artist and pedagogue interested in urban studies, anarcho-collectivism, political theater and legal anthropology. She organizes workshops and produces video installations through non-competitive pedagogical models, within and outside the field of contemporary art.

Ima-Abasi Okon is an artist and works with sculpture, sound, and video. Okon lives and works between London and Amsterdam.

Charlie Prodger is a Glasgow-based artist working with moving image, sculpture, writing and drawing. Broadly, Prodger’s work orbits histories - from the weight of deep geological time to more contingent forms of narrative such as anecdote and oral history. Her film trilogy "Stoneymollan Trail" (2015), "BRIDGIT" (2016) and "SaF05" (2019) uses the prism of queer subjectivity to explore intertwined relations between the body, landscape, language, technology, and time. Prodger is currently working on new series of drawings and a long-term, autofictional writing project. 

Gloria Hasnay has been working at Kunstverein München since 2019, where she also acted as interim director until October 2024. Previously, she was a gallery director in Düsseldorf, where she also co-founded the project space Linden.

Arif Kornweitz (*1987) is an artist, a research fellow and a PhD candidate at the KIM Research Group on Critical Artificial Intelligence at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. His research explores the history of conflict prediction and the application of machine learning in the humanitarian sector, as part of the AI Forensics Consortium project. Arif holds an MSc in Conflict Resolution and Governance from the University of Amsterdam.

In addition to his research, Arif currently serves as the Head of a Master’s programme at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, focusing on fine arts practices that engage with music and AI. Previously, he has lectured at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and been a guest lecturer at Iceland University, ArtEZ Arnhem, the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe, and at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

Arif is also the co-founder of Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, a curatorial platform for contemporary art, critical music, and sound. This platform reimagines radio as a space for artistic practice beyond traditional sound art. Additionally, Arif recently launched UUUSE, a label that explores the intersection of visual arts and electronic music.

With her installation ‘La chair des choses’, consisting of two paintings, Camille Lütjens demonstrates a painting practice that observes, comments and reflects on the visual world that surrounds us every day, while also engaging decisively with the history and possibilities of the medium. Camille Lütjens creates intelligent, seductive, ambiguous, often enigmatically encrypted visual spaces that draw on the flood of images surrounding us, ranging from high to low, pop to the history of painting.

The two paintings ‘A Wedge to Open the Gap’ (2025) and ‘Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday’ (2025) are based on drawings from a DIY furniture-making instruction book from the 1970s and show enlarged excerpts from instructional drawings for the construction and repair of wooden chairs. The layers of material visible in the dissected view of the chair are painted in different styles and can be read as references to specific painterly gestures. The two paintings hang opposite each other in a narrow, specially constructed corridor-like structure made of two wooden billboards. Viewing the pictures thus becomes a (meta)physical event that in turn draws attention to the perspective of the viewer.

The diploma jury was unanimously convinced by the way Camille Lütjens pursues images and painting – as the artistic medium per se – in her practice in an intelligent and humorous manner.

From 6 to 20 June 2025, the MA Fine Arts diploma exhibition transformed Toni-Areal into a site of exploration and exchange. Open daily from 12:00 to 20:00, and launched with a festive vernissage on 5 June 2025, the show marked a key highlight of the artistic calendar at ZHdK.

The Diploma Exhibition All Dimensions unfolded as both an assembly of individual artistic inquiries and a collective space for reflection. Each work posited questions about scale, embodiment, perception, mapping and translation, and explored how art expands through time, place, and relation.

The exhibition was curated by Gloria Hasnay.

More info about the exhibition
Portfolios of the Fine Arts graduates 2025

With the Sponsorship Award, the Cantonal Council recognises individuals or groups whose artistic or cultural mediation work is of high quality and shows great potential for development. One of the two Sponsorship Awards, each worth 30,000 Swiss francs, was awarded in 2026 to the collective “volumes”.

The collective “volumes” was founded in Zurich in 2013 by Anne-Laure Franchette, Patrizia Mazzei and Gloria Wismer. All three are rooted in different areas of artistic and cultural practice. A shared passion for the printed art book connects them and marked the beginning of their success story. With the 2026 Sponsorship Award, the Canton of Zurich honours “volumes” as an attractive platform for art publications and encourages the collective to continue providing broad audiences with access to art.

Anne-Laure Franchette completed her Master in Fine Arts at ZHdK in 2019 and subsequently took part in the ZHdK support programme “What’s next_Compass”. Today, she works between Zurich and Geneva. Her practice materializes through field research, archival enquiries, creative writing and installations. In her research she investigates questions of migration and identity, material and waste culture, nomenclature and archiving practices. She is currently conducting a doctoral research (Spontaneous Archives) on plants as archives of memory at the art school HEAD and the polytechnic school EPFL.

In his artistic practice, Vincent Schmid explores fiction and the ways in which it emerges through simple sculptural gestures or through found, as well as self-recorded, photographic and moving images. His works are often humorous and draw attention to surprising or unusual scenes.

He was nominated for the Liu Shiming Award because, throughout his studies on the MA Fine Arts programme, he succeeded in developing and refining his artistic practice in a particularly compelling way.

Gili Tal (b.1983) is a British artist living in London. Her recent solo shows include Galerie Buchholz, NY, Jenny’s, NY, Cabinet, London and Francesca Pia, Zürich. Her work has been presented in several institutional exhibitions including at CCA Montreal (2022), Prada Foundation, Venice (2021), Kunstverein Braunschweig (solo, 2020), Kunstverein München (2020), gta Exhibitions, ETH Zürich (solo, 2019), LUMA Westbau, Zürich (2018), and Swiss Institute, New York (2018). She studied Fine Art Painting (BA) and Contemporary Art Theory (MA) in London.

Not only are dogs allowed in the Helmhaus, they are actually welcomed. The Helmhaus is a visual arts institution belonging to the City of Zurich. Its employees are thus employees of the city, like the staff of the police department – and police dogs, come to that. For the young Zurich artist and ZHdK MA Fine Arts Alumnus Roman Selim Khereddine, these facts served as the premise of his first institutional exhibition. His video installation created specially for the occasion turns on control and hierarchies – between human and non-human creatures, between individuals and institutions, between a white exhibition space and all those who move around inside it.

The exhibition runs from 19 April to 16 June 2024

More information

Patricia Meier's 2-channel video “the earth so soft, a place to be in”, a kind of film diary, unfolds a multi-layered and fragmentary narrative on complex themes such as vulnerability, family and illness. Two screens mounted next to each other show shots of everyday scenes that seem disjointed at first glance: the artist and her father tidying up, a bed frame being dismantled and carried into the garden, dogs playing, a wheelchair being pushed through a hospital corridor, an excavator piling up freshly cut branches.

The images show dualities: public and private, human and non-human, care work and artistic work, daughter and mother, life and death; poles that organically interweave in the rhythm of this skilfully edited video. The camera - most parts of the video are filmed with a smartphone - serves Patricia Meier simultaneously as a medium of distancing and the search for closeness. For example, in the last part of the video, she is filmed performing a song in a staged close-up. The text of this composition subtitles the preceding shots. Patricia Meier is a musician and artist and brings her two different artistic approaches together in this work. In her diploma thesis, she succeeds in reflecting on existential themes as well as issues relating to artistic authorship in a convincing and accessible way. She is thus able to translate a very personal topic into a universal narrative.

We warmly welcome Morag Keil, PRICE and Ilaria Vinci to MA Fine Arts! Angharad Williams and Doireann O'Malley have also been with us since last autumn. And: The Master Fine Arts Degree Show in June will be curated by Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff and Elisa R. Linn!

About the guest lecturers:

Morag Keil is a Scottish artist living and working in London. Her work was recently exhibitet at Jennys, New York (2023); Ivory Tars, Glasgow, Scotland (2021); Project Native Informant, London (2014); Real Fine Arts, New York (2014); Cubitt, London 2013

PRICE (*1986, Brazil) is an artist and curator who looks back on a series of recent international exhibitions and performances. He has launched several musical projects and released them through music labels. PRICE was a guest curator for the performance programme at Les Urbaines from 2017 to 2021 and is one of the seven curators of the art space Lateral Roma, which he co-founded with Geraldine Tedder.

Ilaria Vinci (*1991, Cisternino) is an artist who lives and works in Zurich. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Kunsthalle Zurich, (2023), Museion, Bolzano (2023), Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (2023); MACRO Museum, Rome (2022); Fondazione Sandretto, Turin (2021); Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen (2021); Plymouth Rock, Zurich (2021), among others.

Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff and Elisa R. Linn are going to be the curators of this year’s Master Fine Arts Degree Show 2024! They have been co-directing the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg e.V. since 2022. They both teach at the Leuphana University. 
Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff studied philosophy, art and architecture history as well as history of science at Humboldt-Universität Berlin and ETH Zürich before taking up positions at Kunsthaus Glarus and Kunstverein Nürnberg. She has been working and teaching at art academies and universities, among them Universität der Künste Berlin and ETH Zurich. Elisa R. Linn has worked with The Kitchen, Whitney Museum, Bronx Museum in New York, South London Gallery, and the National Gallery Prague, among others. Since 2012 she has been organizing the curatorial and artistic collective km temporaer together with architect and curator Lennart Wolff. She is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Curatorial Program and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She held the interim professorship of Art Theory and Mediation at the Academy in Nuremberg and regularly contributes to publications and journals such as Artforum, Frieze, Starship, Texte zur Kunst, BOMB, and Jacobin. 

Angharad Williams (*Wales) and Doireann O’Malley (*1981, Ireland) have been guest lecturers at the MFA since the start of the previous autumn semester and we are happy that they’ll stay with us for the upcoming spring semester!
Angharad Williams is an artist and writer living in Berlin. Williams has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and published their first book Eraser with After8 books in 2023. Doireann O’Malley is an Irish artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. Their research-based work experiments with digital tools, exploring the politics of representation, gender and community within a de-colonial framework. They have exhibited in numerous groups and solo shows and were a participant on the Berlin Program for Artistic Research and Berlin Program for Artists.

In the current spring semester we welcome two international artists and a curator as guest lecturers. Visiting us in the Master Fine Arts are Carissa Rodriguez, Pilvi Takala and Anna Goetz, who will be curating the Master Fine Arts diploma exhibition 2023.

Carissa Rodriguez (US, born 1970) lives and works in New York City. Solo institutional exhibitions include John Young Museum of Art, Honolulu (2021), The Art Institute of Chicago (2020), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019), MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2018), SculptureCenter, New York (2018). Rodriguez participated in the Whitney Biennials of 2014 and 2019. Rodriguez is a Lecturer at Harvard University in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies. Her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe will open in 2023 at Kunstverein Munich, Germany.

Pilvi Takala’s (born 1981, Helsinki) video works are based on performative interventions in which she researches specific communities to process social structures and question the normative rules of our behaviour. Her works show that it is often possible to learn about the implicit rules of a social situation only by its disruption.

Anna Roberta Goetz (born in Basel, Switzerland) is a curator and writer specializing in artistic strategies that challenge governing narratives and structures in society. Over the past five years, she has been working as an independent curator between Europe and Mexico, and between 2012 and 2017, she worked at MMK Museum for Modern Art Frankfurt. Since 2022, she is working as a curator at the Museum Marta Herford.