Crew, 2025
Actress, 2025
FX, 2025
In her works developed for Plattform25, Zurich-based artist Thilda Bourqui (based in Zurich) engages with the (plastic) surgery room as a site of medical performance. She draws her interest on the different relationships – between repulse, need and wish – either voluntary or involuntary patients may develop to this setting, its infrastructure, aesthetics and, ultimately, its staff. Drawing on her background in graphic design, the artist combines drawing, text and video by exploring digital collage techniques and uses sculpture to expand the narrative layer into the exhibition space. By blending numeric and physical elements, her work invites viewers to consider the interlaced space between personal experience, pop culture, and broader institutional structures.
The animated video work Crew (2025) depicts four stereotypical figures, a male surgeon and three female nurses, portrayed in medical attire. All of them are equipped with oversized medical instruments – such as stethoscopes, scalpels, or syringes – that they carry like weapons, yet paradoxically also like shields, displaying a slightly aggressive or defensive posture. Like the characters in X-Men, the heroic US-blockbuster debuting in the early 2000s, the group presents itself as a united team with superpowers. The animated sequence acts as opening scene of the medical performance following, therefore drawing a direct comparison between the surgery room and a movie studio: An almost cinematic, artificially lit setting where different roles are attributed to a defined selection of actors, who – staging a meticulous selection of costumes and props (e.g. the medical instruments) – perform both precise and repetitive procedures and respond to each other (as well as to the patients) in established hierarchical manner. The almost allegorical seeming figures are directed by a medical lamp, which takes on the role of the director and gives instructions to the cast. Set within the aesthetics of stop motion and low-tech production, Crew inhabits a space of imperfection – an early draft, an unfinished composition, an unpolished artifact, still in flux. The process is laid bare, a performative gesture, dissolving the illusion of a finalised cinematic spectacle. Nearby, Actress (2025), an oversized thermometer sculpture, symbolically takes on the role of the patient, often being objectified and reduced to its condition and erasing the actual protagonist. Ultimately a storyboard, FX (2025), sketches the potential continuation of the heroic movie.
In her latest body works, Bourqui reflects on the dramatisation and staging of the medical procedures within two dominant Western institutions, that both often contribute to instill a sense of horror toward medical conditions: the hospital and the cinema. At the same time, she draws a line between the cinematic and the medical fighting (instead of healing) against a condition, resulting in a health system where the patient’s identification dissolves and the “cured” is always more valued than the “sick”.
Selma Meuli