Severin Hallauer, born in Basel in 1996, based in Mexico City and Zurich, is a multimedia artist whose work spans installations, videos, performances, sculptures, photography, painting, and poetry. Hallauer’s process-oriented and performative practice is driven by a deep exploration of identity, power structures, and body politics. His radical openness and unflinching methodology enable him to transform intimate autobiographical experiences into universal, emotionally charged reflections on the complexities of human existence. Hallauer's work blends personal narratives with socio-political themes, creating dynamic pieces that challenge viewers to confront the intersections between the private and public, individual and collective, and society and identity. By questioning contemporary norms and power dynamics, he opens up spaces for discourse, encouraging a raw and unfiltered engagement with pressing human questions. Hallauer’s contributions to the arts have earned him several accolades, including the Visual Arts Prize of the Canton of Solothurn in 2021. His work has been exhibited in venues such as Art Basel's Hiddenbar, Kunsthalle Bern, the Youth Art Biennale in Fortezza, Sofia Art Week, and the ACT Performance Festival in Switzerland, alongside shows across Europe and North America.
Short Practice Statement
Severin Hallauer’s artistic practice is situated at the intersection of performance, installation, video, sculpture, and text. Deeply rooted in autobiographical experience, his work investigates themes such as queerness, migration, familial imprinting, and emotional rupture, often confronting the viewer with moments of exposure and existential vulnerability.
Hallauer works across disciplines to create emotionally charged, materially grounded pieces that often take the form of performative installations, spatial interventions, or time-based media. His projects navigate the blurred lines between personal narrative and collective structures, exploring how intimate experience can reveal larger social dynamics. His approach is conceptually rigorous yet intuitively driven, often engaging with cultural codes tied to social formation, control, and memory.
Due to his transitory life between Switzerland, Mexico City, and New York, Hallauer’s practice also engages with anthropological and ethnological perspectives—examining how cultural dissonance, hybridity, and displacement shape personal and collective identity.
Hallauer’s work culminates through existential introspection in the manifestation of universal, condensed images that make his practice both urgent and emotionally accessible. His pieces are never merely expressive—they distill affect, memory, and critique into formally precise yet deeply felt gestures.
Recent works such as Eros y Ambigüedad (presented at Revuelta Queer House in Mexico City) examine the fallout of obsessive relationships across cultural boundaries, using poetic reenactment and material juxtaposition to reflect on silence, loss, and the limits of reconciliation. Other ongoing projects delve into inherited trauma, displacement, and the aesthetics of vulnerability—often using the artist’s own body or voice as a site of inquiry.
Hallauer’s practice refuses comfort. It exposes, unsettles, and seeks to create spaces where affect, confrontation, and reflection can co-exist. His work is not only personal—it is political, formal, and relentlessly honest.