Présentation

Céline Manz is a Swiss multidisciplinary artist whose research-based work examines how institutional forces influence what becomes visible in history and how knowledge is sustained within dominant frameworks and rendered peripheral. Working with installation, sound, moving image, and archival inquiry, she investigates the mechanisms through which narratives are constructed and maintained, with particular attention to feminist perspectives on authorship and historiography. Her projects often develop through long-term investigations that combine embodied studio experimentation with collaborations in scientific and archival contexts. She integrates methods from both artistic research and empirical disciplines, translating them into sensory forms that foreground what dominant narratives leave partially obscured. Fragile materials, infrasonic sound, and site-responsive recordings function as tools for examining how gaps in the historical record are produced and sustained. A recurring concern in Manz’s work is the relationship between knowledge production and institutional authority. Earlier projects considered how legal frameworks, archival conventions, and exhibition practices influence how artists are remembered. More recent works extend this inquiry toward the administrative and scientific systems that quietly determine whose contributions remain legible over time. Her installations frequently engage specific locations or bodies of research, transforming them into environments where suppressed histories can resurface as perceptual experiences. By translating research into physical and acoustic encounters, she invites audiences to engage with historical material through the body as well as the intellect, emphasizing that the past is encountered as much through sensation as through documentation. Through this interdisciplinary approach, Manz treats artistic practice as a form of inquiry capable of exposing blind spots within official narratives. Her works operate as provisional research sites that question institutional authority while opening space for alternative ways of relating to the past.

Parcours

Céline Manz is a Swiss artist working internationally with installation, sound, and research-based media. She holds an MA from the Royal College of Art and a BA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions across Europe and beyond, including projects in Basel, Strasbourg, Istanbul, and Amsterdam, and in group exhibitions at major venues such as the Whitechapel Gallery.

Her practice has received extensive support through grants, residencies, and research programs, notably from Pro Helvetia, Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt, and international institutions. Recent highlights include a dual residency with Arts at CERN and the Pierre Auger Observatory, as well as international residencies in Guangzhou, Prague, Istanbul, and Paris.

Manz’s work has been included in the Swiss Art Awards and is held in public and institutional collections in Switzerland and the Netherlands. Through a sustained engagement with research, archives, and cross-disciplinary collaboration, her practice operates at the intersection of art, science, and critical historiography.