Linn Nora Henz is an artist who was initially trained in cinema. She later studied Visual Arts at HEAD – Geneva as well as at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and obtained a Master’s degree in 2025.
As part of her project for the exhibition Plattform26, Henz proposes an intervention that enters into dialogue with the context in which she has been invited. She visited the KBCB and stayed in one of the rooms available to artists working on site. While visiting the technical workshop, her attention was drawn to cubes of expanded polystyrene and to the expressive qualities of their surfaces. The technical manager, Paolo Merico, explains that he repurposed these objects at the end of an exhibition in which they had been part of an artwork, with the aim of facilitating his workshop tasks. These modular objects became supports for cutting, painting, and moving bulky materials in connection with subsequent exhibitions at the institution. From 19 February to 17 May 2026, these sagex cubes will (re)take their place in the first-floor galleries. The artist assigns them the status of sculptures, gives them a title, arranges them, and adds minimal interventions. During this period, they remain entirely at the disposal of the technical team and will be returned to the workshop at the end of the exhibition.
The title Stumme Diener, literally translated as “silent servant”, refers to the piece of furniture of the same name: an object that replaces a human domestic helper at a moment when the aspiration to a certain lifestyle exceeds the means available. During the installation, Henz used the pedestals in the literal sense of their title, as she employs them in place of a mobile tripod for her camera. Present during the installation of all the participating artists, Henz is busy immortalizing the construction of the exhibition, following its unfolding like a film script. A visual reproduction of these moments is also present in the installation; it reveals a behind the scenes of Plattform26 situated somewhere between fiction and para-exhibition document.
The artist also took up her camera to stage the “most beautiful” of the six pedestals in the KBCB guest room. This photograph is produced as a postcard print, created in collaboration with the institution and available free of charge at the reception desk.
Drawing on her background in cinema, Henz has inherited a particular interest (even a fetish) for the mechanics of image production. In response, she enjoys diverting professional equipment and adapting it to her own resources. The materials that Linn Nora Henz uses are often borrowed, exchanged, returned, or resold at the end of her projects. This approach makes the conditions and economy of production an integral part of her works. Henz produces as she lives. Rooted in a strong literary sensibility, her pieces are formally determined by gestures. As these gestures become signs, they reveal what the artist calls “the performative mechanisms inherent to life”, or they allow objects and images to be reconsidered from a new perspective that insists on double meaning and on the ambiguity of what is presented.
Katia Leonelli
(Translated from French)