Monika Emmanuelle Kazi is a multidisciplinary artist based in Geneva and a graduate of HEAD – Geneva. Born in 1991 in the Paris region, she grew up between Pointe-Noire, Republic of the Congo, and Paris, France. After an initial training in interior architecture, she coined the term iso-object in 2015 (ISO referring to the International Organization for Standardization) to describe how the elements of our living environments become standardized images upon which the body both relies and merges.
Her practice explores the manifestations of embodied memory within domestic spaces, investigating the emotional charge of everyday objects, gestures, materials, and architectures as porous zones of contact, traces of histories in motion. Through organic installations, performative scenographies, and text-based works, she creates environments in which bodies, memories, and spaces continuously shape one another.
Her work has been presented at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Palais de l'Athénée (Geneva), MASI (Lugano), and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims), among others. She is the recipient of the Bally Artist Award (2024) and the Kiefer Hablitzel | Göhner Art Prize (2021). Monika Emmanuelle Kazi is currently an artist-in-residence at CERN in Geneva as part of the Arts at CERN programme.
https://monikaemmanuelle.com
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In terrain meuble, (moving ground), Monika Emmanuelle Kazi continues her exploration of the movable partition, an architectural element she first developed through her Partition Walls series initiated in 2025. Far from serving merely to organize space, Kazi's partitions function as porous membranes in which the artist archives personal and familial narratives that intertwine with collective trajectories. For Halle Nord, she presents an installation composed of four \"walls\" that function both as screens and receptacles, forming a scenography in constant transformation. Potentially activated through the artist's performances, the installation appears to come alive as the partitions shift position through the gestures that move them and the stories they receive.
Developed in partnership with the centre culturel suisse in Paris and Kunsthaus Uri, terrain meuble unfolds across distinct architectural settings, each embedded within its own temporality, material history, and specific context. Rather than simply occupying these spaces, the work allows itself to be shaped by them, making each presentation a new activation of memory, enriched by new sculptural and performative elements that inscribe each chapter of the exhibition within its unique environment.
This attention to surfaces within their particular contexts echoes the writings of Beatriz Colomina, who has shown how domestic space actively participates in the production of intimacy. Architecture is never a neutral backdrop; it structures relationships, ways of looking, and ways of inhabiting. In Kazi's work, however, this logic is displaced. Her partitions no longer merely prescribe uses: they bear witness to the lives that have passed through them.
Kazi's inquiry also resonates with the writings of Nkgopoleng Moloi, whose thinking has informed the development of terrain meuble. For the South African critic, built environments remain traversed by the circulation of histories, materials, and power relations. Buildings retain the traces of the movements, exchanges, and violences that have shaped them, while simultaneously leaving room for other narratives to emerge. This perspective closely aligns with Kazi's practice, which foregrounds the material and symbolic circulations inherited from colonial history—from construction materials to timber species, from architectural forms to domestic imaginaries—without ever reducing them to a single narrative.
Rejecting a monumental reading of history, terrain meuble instead attends to what remains fragile and often invisible, particularly materials and everyday uses. The work reveals a form of memory that is inscribed not in grand historical narratives but in what persists as residue, where the legacies of colonialism continue to shape the spaces we inhabit.
— Elise Lammer
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