Sabrina Röthlisberger Belkacem graduated from the Haute École d’Art et de Design (HEAD) in Geneva in 2016. After receiving the New Heads Award and unrestricted grants from the FCAC, she completed a residency at the Swiss Institute in New York in 2019, supported by Pro Helvetia, as well as a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, scheduled for 2024. Since 2019, she has collaborated regularly with the Centre d’Art de Genève, where she produced a film for the latest edition of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement. In 2020, she began working with Galerie Gaudel de Stampa in Paris, which currently represents her.
Her work is active on both national and international art scenes, having been presented at prestigious venues such as the Musée d’Art Moderne d’Oran in Algeria, Les Urbaines in Lausanne, Maison Populaire in Montreuil, Paris, Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunstmuseum Thun, and Kunsthalle Osnabrück in Germany, as well as at the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement in Beijing, Venice, and Taipei, among others. She was awarded the Aeschlimann-Corti Grant in 2019, along with unrestricted grants from the City of Geneva and the BNP New HEAD prize in 2017. She also participated in the Swiss Art Awards in 2019 and 2024.
Sabrina Röthlisberger Belkacem’s artistic practice revolves around multiple identities, healing, transformation, and a more inclusive rewriting of art history. Her recent works, such as LE SANG (performance and poetry collection), Santa Sangre (film), and Vénus Convalescente (oil painting), draw from her personal experiences in relation to major works of art history. They explore the tension between the sacred and the profane, as well as dualities between healthy and sick bodies, life and death, science and magic. Her pain, achievements, progress, and victories as a woman, artist, and patient are evoked and contextualized through key symbols of art history, questioning who has the legitimacy to create and exist as an artist.
Following several surgeries that often left her bedridden, she began writing a poetry collection entitled Le Sang, published during her residency at the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève in 2020–21. These poems also inspired a performance presented at the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève and at Maison Populaire in Montreuil. After hospitalization and convalescence in 2022–23, she launched a new artistic project titled Sense of Truths, focused on creating crocheted sculptures and clothing. This project allows her to consider fashion and design as extensions of her work on anthropomorphism, creating forms that evoke her hybrid woman-beast sculptures. This practice with wool aims to foster relaxation, soothe the mind, and achieve altered states of consciousness, offering an escape from the persistent worries often linked to painful emotions.
She recently completed the second act of her performance series Santa Sangre. This new act, OPÉRA SOUS FENTANYL, was presented at La Ferme du Buisson, at FRAC Bretagne as part of the Cultural Center Tour, and at the closing of the Espace d’Art May in Basel. She is currently working on the third act, which will focus on the conclusion of her own healing process. This act will take the form of a small theater/opera piece, integrating music, narrative, and staging. Conceived as an exploration of resilience and rebirth, the act will involve characters and voices to give shape to an inner dialogue between pain and recovery, creating a stage space where performance becomes a ritual of transformation. The project is also situated within Crip theory, questioning norms of health and the body, while celebrating the experiences of disabled and ill people. By incorporating these perspectives, Sabrina Röthlisberger Belkacem seeks to redefine the notion of healing, highlighting the beauty and complexity of life paths that are often marginalized.
