Anne Rochat experiments with her own body as a way to test its limits and connect organically with the world around her. The resulting body art – poetic, dark or meditative, and always replete with activist undertones – is an exercise in endurance, performed live in front of an audience or recorded on video for later viewing. Whether she’s hiking across Bolivia’s Uyuni Salt Flat, swimming the length of the Lac de Joux, immersed in a body of water with her brother and sharing a single breathing tube, or standing on a rock in the style of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Rochat’s meticulously planned performances aim to “create the perceptible experience of displacement, discomfort, the exotic, the disturbing or the surprising, and then seek to recreate their substance in a form made flesh in a body”. Her projects also convey her questions and concerns about inequalities in the world, and about the environmental and geopolitical pressures that threaten to upset its fragile balance.

Anne Rochat (b. 1982) grew up in her native Vallée de Joux and studied at the University of Arts and Design, Lausanne (ECAL). She is based in Berlin but works as a travelling artist, tailoring her performances to diverse contexts and locations in places such as Switzerland, China and India. A recipient of numerous awards, grants and residencies, she previously headed the Performance Unit at the Valais School of Art (EDHEA) and now teaches the Art Fundaments class at EPFL.

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