Inner Light
CATALOGUE
Inner Light presents CATALOGUE, an exhibition created in collaboration with Lyna Azwaw. The collective invited the artist to conceive a display, which she accompanies with an opening performance titled a serious flaw in her costume. The lyrics sung during the performance are drawn from a work by American artist Kristin Oppenheim, presented at the Centre d’édition contemporaine in 1996, thirty years ago.
For CATALOGUE, Inner Light draws on documents and editions held at the CEC. Their edition borrows graphic motifs and textual elements that speak to a local passion for publishing. From Bernadette Corporation to Throbbing Gristle, from artist stamps to Fabrice Gygi, by way of Sylvie Fleury, Inner Light hijacks artist merch and perverts the very ownership of appropriation. These sources feed the expansion of their codex of prints.
Turning to the paper or plastic bag, Inner Light pushes its reflections on fashion to their limit. An accessory tied to consumption, of no conservational interest, the bag is the banal transitory object par excellence — an advertising surface, waste in the making. In its series of 12 printed, sewn, and lined plastic bags, the object’s degradation manifests a reaction to the abjection of consumption. A latent trope of their practice, this aggression is nonetheless a sign of attention and attachment. In a moment situated after the time of possession, reuse synthesizes and exceeds the morbid pleasure of conservation.
In the exhibition, a series of prints on paper traces a creative process that makes no distinction between the work and the document. Lined up along a wall, the prints reveal, in negative, the garments previously printed. Textile matter becomes motif; it absorbs the matrix and circulates by transfer. This ambivalence recurs in the sculptural silhouette by designer Leandro Russo, interpreted and reinterpreted from performance to installation.
The arrangement and assemblages proposed by Lyna Azwaw incorporate the Centre d’édition’s own furniture and conservation equipment. Boxes of edition stock, packaging, folders, tarpaulins, tables, a plan chest — so many islands to which the editions attach themselves. The scenography spills beyond its usual perimeter. This poetics of infrastructure and logistics guides attention toward the regimes of value, classification, and status that structure the institution. It touches on the stratification of symbolic capital on which the venue’s historical reputation rests.
For Inner Light, collaboration is the primary engine. The brand’s financial realism is constantly subverted. The label freely practices gift-giving, sacrifice, and potlatch; depending on the mood, alliances and placement strategies more situationist than commercial. Under punk cover, their practice inscribes itself within a tradition of expanding the field of art, forcing an institutional deconditioning, and tending to the revision of the operations and protocols of an art space in flux.
By extending the hang across all four rooms, the collaboration fantasizes the dissolution of the public/private divide, the division of labor between reception, exhibition, storage, and archives. By offering visitors the possibility of navigating these other rooms, the artists expose the institution and its habits — as though it needed them to restore its living continuum and lead it to make an œuvre of its own shell.
09.07.2026, 8 PM – 10 PM
Opening
8 PM
Performance and installation by Lyna Azwaw, with contributions from Js Donny, Rosalie Dubois and Leandro Russo, and featuring Denis Tân Désir, Chirine Samii and Iris Pfyffer.
9 PM
Book launch of Inner Light’s first book, Corpus, published by Kermesse, Paris.
15.07 – 31.07.2026
The exhibition is open to the public.
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Biographies
Founded in 2018 by Kim Coussée, Eliott Villars and Gaïa Vincensini, Inner Light is a Swiss art collective based in Geneva, Lausanne and Paris. By applying printmaking techniques to clothing, objects and performance spaces, the artists explore the contemporary conditions surrounding the production, circulation and activation of printed images.
The collective’s work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Switzerland and internationally, including at the Centre d’art contemporain de Genève, the Centre Pompidou, the FRAC Lorraine and the Kunsthalle Bern. The collective’s work has also been featured in publications such as Novembre, Alei Journal, Terremoto, TRAX, Manners, Zurich Moves and A Part. They regularly collaborates with artists, musicians and designers, including Christelle Oyiri, Agatha Ingarden, Maëlle Gross, Sabrina Röthlisberger, IUTER, Maïro and OKLOU.
Lyna Azwaw’s practice lies at the intersection of installation, sculpture, writing and performance. She uses materials and texts precisely, taking into account their contexts, uses and possible transformations. The objects she uses move from one project to another, either being relocated or reactivated. Her writing explores the transition between languages, drawing on her fragmented relationship with Arabic, English and French. Since 2022, she has co-directed BRUTAL, a series of poetry and textual performance events in Marseille. She also writes and performs under the name yaabilar.
We would like to express our sincere thanks to the Leenaards Foundation and the Department of culture and digital transition of the City of Geneva for their support of this project.
