Daniel Bolliger's Wildcards
The wildcards will be presented by Daniel Bolliger, long-time curator of photoSCHWEIZ and now lead curator of the curatorial contribution council.
You can see more of his wildcards, TOKAY, Arthur Heck, Santiago Martinez, Marco Vannotti and Johanna Huller at photoSCHWEIZ in February 2026.
Daniel Bolliger
Swiss artist Daniel Bolliger studied photography at the ZHdK and the Düsseldorf Art Academy before completing his Master's degree at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His graduation project was nominated for the Adobe Achievement Awards and brought him international attention.
He lived and worked for many years in New York, Los Angeles and London, including for the renowned Gloss Studio with global brands such as Gucci, Dior, Louis Vuitton and Alexander McQueen. His work has appeared in Vogue, i-D, DAZED and other international magazines.
Today he lives in Zurich and works as a creative director and motion designer in the field of film and animation. His focus: progressive visual worlds with depth and clear visual power.
"I am interested in progressive works. Classically realized as photography, but also in exciting variations at the interface to new media and technologies. It is important that the works have depth - and a message. And that they are visually exciting. As profane as it may sound, a good picture is still a good picture".
© TOKAY
TOKAY
The presentation of the Swiss-Turkish director, creative producer and animator TOKAY is a particular pleasure. His work has been followed closely for some time, and the presentation as part of the HSLU MA Animation Master's exhibition made a particular impression. The characters, the set and the attention to detail of his film DOUBLE OR NOTHING show an impressive combination of technical precision and narrative depth.
Stop Motion is essentially photography, frame by frame, moment by moment. It is precisely this approach that makes TOKAY's work so exciting in the context of photoSCHWEIZ. His precise visual language and his feel for light, material and composition illustrate how fluid the boundaries between film and photography can be.
DOUBLE OR NOTHING makes a powerful statement about a greed-driven world. Based on an anecdote from the booming Tokyo of the 1980s, the film tells the glamorous story of the unscrupulous real estate shark Akio Kashiwagi and the greed that ultimately destroys him. The work is internationally successful and has won awards at numerous renowned animation film festivals.
The set installation and presentation bring a refreshing new level to the exhibition and invite you to take a closer look. The work is convincingly positioned at the interface between animation, film and photography.
Animation is teamwork:
Production Design: Konstantin Rosshoff - Director of Photography: Marco Jöger - Animation/Animator: Elie Chapuis(e.g. Ma vie de Courgette by Claude Barras, Fantastic Mr. Fox / Isle of Dogs by Wes Anderson).
Arthur Heck
Arthur Heck
The artist Arthur Heck presents a work that captivates with a fragile, intimate and at the same time haunting visual language. His photography unfolds a remarkable sensitivity and depth, which is evident both in the images themselves and in their spatial extensions.
Arthur's practice moves between closeness and distance, between personal vulnerability and a world in flux. His photographs and installations search for tender moments of connection - for quiet anchors in a time in which the private sphere is increasingly permeated by external forces.
His artistic investigations focus on bodies and their reactions to change: how they absorb, adapt or resist. Intimacy appears as a place that is simultaneously vulnerable and resistant. This tension gives rise to a quiet but constant urgency, an echo of discomfort that penetrates personal space through overheating, visibility and social crises.
Arthur Heck studied at the Haute École des Arts du Rhin (BA, 2022) and completed his Master of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts with distinction in 2024. His work has already been presented in various exhibitions, including at The Ballery (Berlin, 2025), Amiamo Caffè (Zurich, 2024) and Fomo Art Space(Zurich, 2023).
His art is a quiet, yet haunting examination of fragility, connection and change, a poetic look at the human condition in transition. An installation of metal and photographs is being created for the exhibition, which enables an intensive, independent encounter with his work.
Santiago Martinez
Santiago Martinez
The artist and photographer Santiago Martinez works with the medium of photography in a remarkably experimental way, consistently questioning conventional methods of image production. His practice opens up new ways of thinking about photographic seeing and expands the traditional approach to include playful, manual and technical elements.
At the center of his work is a self-constructed camera, a deconstructed copying machine equipped with a large-format lens that directly produces A4 prints. This hybrid tool combines mechanics and precision craftsmanship with creative freedom and turns photography into a physical, immediate and processual experience.
Santiago Martinez gained international attention through the Swiss Design Award 2025, which he received in the photography category, an award that recognizes his unconventional and bold approach. He completed his artistic training at ECAL, where he obtained a bachelor's degree in photography.
His works move between representation and abstraction and open up surprising visual perspectives. He is currently developing a new series in his studio, based on his mobile copier camera, which has already been used for an outdoor project.
The presentation shows an installation that makes his experimental approach and the aesthetic complexity of his image production tangible, an invitation to view photography from an unusual, inspiring perspective.
Marco Vannotti
Marco Vannotti
The photographer and psychologist Marco Vannotti, who lives in Zurich, is characterized by his multi-layered portraits, which develop a remarkable depth and sensitivity. He focuses on people and objects that are often overlooked, forgotten or suppressed in everyday life. In doing so, he succeeds in focusing on the seemingly trivial or inconspicuous and making their aesthetic and emotional potential visible.
Vannotti's photography sees itself less as pure depiction and more as a form of discovery. His works find beauty in details that often go unnoticed and show that even supposedly "unattractive" or distorted elements can have a fascination of their own. This particular way of making people, objects and situations visible gives his position within photoSCHWEIZ a special relevance.
For the exhibition, a series was selected from his extensive portrait oeuvre that combines both diversity and formal clarity. The installation presented brings these qualities together in a coherent, powerful composition and invites visitors to discover the subtle nuances of his photographic observation.
Johanna Huller
Johanna Hullár
Zurich-based visual artist Johanna Hullár impresses with her playful, surreal and colorful visual language. Her works interweave reality and fiction to create new, sensual spaces of experience and open up access to worlds in transition - fleeting, humorous and full of lightness.
Hullár works at the interface of photography, video and sculptural installation. Experimentation with time, materiality and perception is central to her practice. Natural and artificial materials enter into a multi-layered dialog in her works: frozen, moving or changing objects combine the ephemeral with the permanent and create visual worlds that appear both fragile and alive at the same time.
Her artistic training led her from a degree in communication design at the HTW Berlin to a master's degree in photography at the ECAL, University of Art and Design Lausanne. She has received several awards for her transdisciplinary and experimental approach, including the Swiss Design Awards 2024 and the Prix de l'ECAL 2020; she was also nominated for the Prix Mobilière 2024. Her work has been presented internationally, including at Kunsthalle Mannheim, Jungkunst Winterthur, Swiss House Milano and Paris Photo. In 2023 she was Artist in Residence at La Becque.
Hullár's work is characterized by a subtle humour and a special lightness with which themes such as transience, materiality or visions of the future are negotiated. The works unfold small, changing cosmos - poetic, independent and full of visual energy and mark an outstanding position within contemporary visual art.