Marisa Cornejo (born in 1971 in Santiago, Chile) is a Chilean artist who lives and works in Switzerland. The daughter of Communist activists, she fled Chile with her family in 1973 following Pinochet's military coup. Her family's exile took them successively to Argentina, Bulgaria, Belgium and Mexico, where, from the early 1980s, she trained in contemporary dance and visual arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM).
In Mexico City, Cornejo collaborated with the artist-run space La Panadería, a pioneering venue on the Mexican contemporary art scene dedicated to emerging artists. Over the years, it also presented the work of international figures including Richard Kern, Sharon Hayes, Kurt Hollander, Gelitin and Francis Alÿs. It was during this period that she discovered the narrative potential of dreams, which have since become a central source of her artistic practice. After a period in England, she settled near Geneva in 2005.
While completing a Master's degree in Visual Arts at HEAD–Genève, awarded in 2014, Cornejo developed a long-term research practice centred on memory, exile and forced migration, drawing directly on her own personal history. Her work has since taken the form of performances, installations, drawings, publications and sculptures in which archives, narratives and lived experiences are reactivated.
In 2013, she published I am (art&fiction), her first book bringing together a selection of drawings based on her dreams. Through this exploration of the unconscious, she examines the effects of displacement on the construction of identity while shedding light on questions that are at once intimate and collective. This line of enquiry continued in L'empreinte. Une archive d'artiste soustraite au terrorisme d'État (The Trace: An Artist's Archive Rescued from State Terrorism) (art&fiction, 2023), which explores the reappropriation of family archives shaped by Chile's political history.
Her work was recognised with the Fondation Francine Delacrétaz Prize in 2023, followed by a Swiss Art Award in 2024.
Marisa Cornejo's work has been exhibited in Switzerland and internationally in both solo and group exhibitions, including at Helmhaus Zürich (2025); Maison Tavel / MAH Geneva (2025); Lovay Fine Arts, Geneva (2024); the Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile (2023); and the Gallatin Galleries, New York (2023).
","externallinks":[]}],"isupcoming":true,"iscurrent":true,"duration":"durational","displayartistsname":false,"startdate":1788472800,"enddate":1792188000,"category":"Exhibition","smalltext":"In coproduction with BAR Project et HAUS – Espacio de Arte y Prácticas Contemporáneas, BarcelonaOn the occasion of her first institutional solo exhibition in Geneva, Marisa Cornejo (Santiago, Chile, 26 September 1971; lives and works between Geneva, Lausanne and Santiago) presents a series of works exploring different experiences of exile, displacement and non-recognition.
What does it mean to return to a country that has continued to exist without you? This question has run through the work of visual artist and writer Marisa Cornejo for several decades. Born in Chile during the Popular Unity government (Unidad Popular, 4 September 1970–11 September 1973) and forced into exile with her family under the military dictatorship, Cornejo does not seek to recover a lost homeland. Instead, her work examines forms of belonging rendered discontinuous, where memory is constructed from fragments—both real and imagined—to which access was long denied.
","description_long":"In Reflections on Exile (1984), Edward Said, who devoted much of his life to reflecting on the political and existential consequences of exile, describes the capacity of exiled subjects to apprehend the world through what he calls a \"contrapuntal consciousness,\" in which multiple temporalities and geographies coexist without ever merging into a single narrative. Marisa Cornejo's photographs seem to inhabit precisely this space. By revisiting, as an adult, places in Chile from which she had been separated as a child, the artist does not stage a return; rather, she documents the distance between memory and the present, between the image and lived experience. This tension finds a particularly compelling material form in Los Tótems de mi Ausencia (The Totems of My Absence), a series of plaster forms that punctuate the floor of Halle Nord. Partially covered with postcards of Chile, these sculptures give physical presence to a memory long confined to the surface of images. Produced from photographs taken by the artist during recent journeys to Chile, these images reactivate emblematic sites whose landscapes have been shaped as much by national narratives as by the tourist imagination. They also draw upon the postcards her grandparents sent her throughout her childhood in exile—static witnesses to a country that remained inaccessible to her. Cornejo describes these stelae as attempts to \"heal the flattening that modern chronology has imposed on our history\" by giving memories volume, allowing them to occupy space.
The exhibition also resonates with the writings of Franco-Chilean cultural theorist Nelly Richard. In Crítica de la Memoria (1990–2010) (Critique of Memory, (1990-2010), 2010), Richard argues that while Chile's democratic transition did not erase the fractures produced by the military dictatorship, it often concealed them beneath a consensual national narrative. Faced with this gradual erosion of the transmission of memory, art has the capacity to make perceptible the continuities between past and present—a quality exemplified by Marisa Cornejo's literary and visual practice. Whether through her writing, drawings or sculptures, the artist allows us to glimpse, often obliquely, the ways in which this history continues to shape landscapes, objects and bodies.
Partly centred on the figure of the mother, the exhibition also presents a selection of Marisa Cornejo's dream drawings and dream paintings. Since 1997—the year of her final exhibition with the collective La Panadería in Mexico City—the artist has recorded her dreams daily in the form of drawings. These works shift this archaeology of memory towards the body. In La Madre que me Enseña a Respirar (The Mother Who Teaches Me to Breathe), memory is no longer organised according to a chronology of events, but according to a logic of sensation and breath. Breathing becomes a genuine critical operation that seeks to undo the flattening produced by trauma, restoring the body's capacity to inhabit space. The dreams thus articulate a non-linear temporality in which individual memory and collective inheritances coexist without hierarchy. Ultimately, Marisa Cornejo's dream drawings, like the body of work brought together in El Taller de la Fragilidad, offer an intimate translation of exilic consciousness: a space where heterogeneous realities no longer seek resolution, but instead learn to breathe together.
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