Helvetia Art Prize

We are delighted to welcome Helvetia Art Prize as Featured Guest at Liste. This year, the prize presents the work of 2024 award winner Virginie Sistek (*1999).

Sistek, a graduate of the master’s program in Fine Arts at the Institute Art Nature Gender, HGK Basel, explores structures of social power and their subtle mechanisms of control, adaptation, and submission. Her installations, performances, and videos examine processes of domestication—not only in a literal sense but also within social systems and interpersonal dynamics. She is particularly interested in questions of consensus, the automatisms of self-legitimation, and strategies of resistance. Her work is distinguished by a sharp narrative sensibility, balancing social relevance with a subversive sense of humour.

Sistek convinced the 2024 Helvetia Art Prize jury with her large-scale installation Resurrection Ranch, which critically engages with the domestication and exploitation of female horses in the blood farm industry—where mares are kept in near-constant pregnancy to extract hormones used in both livestock farming and human medicine.

The Helvetia Art Prize, awarded since 2004, is a vital launchpad for graduates of Swiss art schools. With a prize money of CHF 15,000 and a solo exhibition at Liste, it provides targeted support for emerging artistic positions. Previous prize winners who have exhibited at Liste include Bisso Yann Stéphane (2023), Jonas Van Holanda (2022), Anita Mucolli (2021), Tiphanie Kim Mall (2020), Kaspar Ludwig (2019), and Gina Proenza (2018).