MAIA GUSBERTI
Maia Gusberti (*1971) is a visual artist and a researcher. She studied Media Arts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and Critical Images at the Royal Institute of Arts in Stockholm. She is a doctoral candidate at KU Leuven/LUCA-School of Arts Gent in the research unit Image and at HSLU DFK, where she worked as a research associate in the CC Art and Public Spheres from 2020 until 2025.
Situated between static and moving image practices, her process-orientated photofilmic assemblages, essayistic video works and installations question the relationship between images and the viewer at hands of visual representations of urban landscapes. Maia Gusberti's research-oriented practice includes curatorial and discursive projects such as the film screenings Komplexe Bilder (Kino REX, Bern) and Complicit Images (Kino REX, Bern and Medienwerkstatt Wien), and the exhibition Choreography of the Image (Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna).
She has lived and worked in Vienna, Cairo, Brussels and Bern, and as an artist in residence in Cairo, Amman, Birzeit (Pro Helvetia) Sofia, Paris, Rome (BMuKK), Brussels and Rotterdam. Her has work has been awarded and presented internationally in exhibitions, conferences and festivals such as Neue Galerie and Medienturm, Graz; Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Le Bal, Paris; CIC – Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; Kunsthalle Bern (CH), HeK Basel; OK, Linz; Shedhalle Zurich; Helmhaus, Zuurich; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; FACT Liverpool; Your Own Spaces – Multiperspectivity and Spatial Practices in Audio / Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, HSLU DFK Emmenbrücke; PARSE Biennial of artistic Research, Götheborg and many others.
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Research Fellow Project: The Image as a Visual Habitat
In her artistic practice and research, Maia Gusberti constructs visual configurations that critically reflect on the functions of images through visual representations of urban landscapes. Both the city and the image are politically contested territories. Lense-based pictures of built urban environments serve as a symbolic stage to visualize the role we play in shaping our world through its images.
Her research fellow project at the Institute for Performance and Film Expanded, “The Image as a Visual Habitat”, is a series of installative settings and performative screenings, which engage photographic and filmic urban landscapes to collectively enact and reflect upon our position as 'visual citizens'. Together, participants – maker and spectators alike – literally translate the German expression 'sich ins Bild setzen' ('to put oneself into the picture, meaning 'to inform oneself') into a performative gesture. We physically interact with the image and engage our imagination to explore ways to become part of 'a bigger picture'. In this process, the image of the city functions as a common ground that allows discourse to be a performative experience in order to re-imagine our involvement in the construction of worldviews.
The aim is to create a complex experimental framework committed to polyphonic encounters that insist on a collective 'act of seeing', stimulate a critical gaze, and explore collaborative ways of knowledge production. During her research fellowship, Maia Gusberti will collect image material, set up and rehearse settings through various tests and try-outs, and share her research with the members of the institute and the public.