Swiss artists have long enjoyed support from their government through the Swiss Art Awards and the Swiss Design Awards, administered by the Federal Office of Culture (FoC). The government has funded the arts since the Swiss Federal Art Commission instituted an award programme in 1899. Today, both awards are twostaged. Participants passing the first round exhibit their work in Messe Basel during Art Basel, providing high visibility to the international art community. A second selection round identifies the laureates who receive an unrestricted award of 25,000 Swiss Francs, providing direct support.

Photography is recognized in both awards albeit in different ways. The Swiss Art Awards selects its applicants on the basis of a portfolio of work, which often includes photography. Many of the mixed media installations and performance pieces featured at the Swiss Art Awards demonstrate a canny, necessary engagement with photography – even if the pieces do not foreground photographs. The Swiss Design Awards consider photography an ‘applied art’ although award selections are for photographers’ personal, rather than commercial, projects.

The fluid combination of media in the service of a strong performance ethic is invigorating. Among the Swiss Art Awards exhibitors, Lausanne’s Loan Nguyen’s Porte-Parole is a mediated storytelling in which images provide a path for an unstable narrative. Laurence Bonvin, a professor of photography at École Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne (ÉCAL), has moved from still photography to video, producing studies in Cape Town and Las Vegas that emphasize sound and space. Basel-based laureate Alexandra Bachzetsis explores the production of gender identity through everyday gestures; her performance video is influenced by Marianne Wex’s photobook Let’s Take Back Our Space (1979). Similarly, Basel-born Max Philip Schmid’s multichannel video work explores gestures by abstracting them from ordinary contexts. Stefan Wegmüller, also based in Basel, offers a critique of the Bank of International Settlements through photographs of a whimsical but sardonic email correspondence with the institution.

Notably, all four of the 2016 Swiss Design Award photography laureates are graduates of ÉCAL. Laurence Rosti, Swiss of Iranian–descent, produced Il n y’a pas d’homosexuels en Iran in Denizli. Homosexuality is illegal in Iran. Denizli is a transit city in Turkey where gay Iranian men, persecuted in their own country, wait as they seek a new home. Etienne Malapert of Lausanne interrogates the idea of the ‘Green City’ in Masdar City in the UAE. It is intended as a self-sustainable energy city in the desert – if it is ever completed. Manon Wertenbroek, also from Lausanne, creates sculptures to be photographed; her brother often appears in her work as a model. And, Simone Cavadini photographs Italian television shows to ask how media spectacles alienate viewers from their subjective experiences.

The awards recognize and support the global, hybrid character of these artists, many of who straddle cultural identities and art worlds. By running the exhibitions concurrently with Art Basel, the FoC provides invaluable international exposure, inviting both domestic and international opportunities. This, in turn, promotes Switzerland as a cultural node in the larger system: at once local and global.