Arts at CERN

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Arts at CERN

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We foster dialogue between artists and CERN scientists through residencies, commissions, and exhibitions
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Arts at CERN was founded in 2011 to explore notions of creativity, human ingenuity and curiosity. Today, artists from all over the world are invited, through our programmes, to spend time at CERN and work alongside particle physicists and engineers. Positioning artists and scientists together within the larger scientific context, our programmes foster new approaches to research, experimentation and artistic production. Furthermore, we want to question how art and culture can form novel visions of a highly specialised environment and what common grounds can be shared between art and science.

09/07/2026

👋 Welcome to , Marie Matusz!

has begun the first part of her Connect India residency at , before her time at in Bengaluru this autumn.

Marie Matusz works with sculptural installations, sound, text, and film. Her practice is informed by an intensive theoretical engagement with philosophical, sociological, and linguistic questions, exploring the conditions of perception, visibility, and spatial experience.

Through her residency Matusz will develop Body in the Dark, a project that marks a continuation with previous explorations of the relationship between body, light and field. Her time at CERN will allow her to draw in depth on particle detection, specifically the conditions in which particles are registered and the traces they leave in a field – inferred from pattern and absence in near-total darkness.

Connect India is part of the Connect collaboration framework between and . Connect India is organised in partnership with , , and .

Credits: 📸 Marina Cavazza | CERN

26/06/2026

➡️ Meet Moonis Ahmad Shah : selected artist for the Connect India dual residency

Moonis Ahmad Shah is a Kashmiri inter-disciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, computer programming, sound and video. His work explores what hovers at the threshold of appearance – what cannot be fully seen, counted or stabilised, yet continues to exert force.

During his residency, he will develop The Threshold Atlas: The Luminous Lal Muni, which takes as a point of departure Lal Muni – the mythical and luminous bird from South Asian folklore that sings to everyone and everything, except to the sovereign king.

Shah will explore scientific thresholds in their theoretical and technical forms – cut-offs, symmetries, indeterminacies, calibration, filtering and the transformation of fleeting phenomena into evidence – to further investigate what becomes signal, what remains noise and how the unseen is brought into language, diagram, data or image.

Connect India is part of the Connect collaboration framework between and . Connect India is organised in partnership with , , and .

Credits:
1: Accidentally Miraculous Everyday from that Heaven, 2021. Photo: Kochi Biennale Foundation
2: Conjectures of a void, 2021. Courtesy of the artist
3: All that you make disappear in my fret, 2025. Photo: Kochi Biennale Foundation
4: Almost Entirely Sisyphus, 2022. Photo: Kochi Biennale Foundation
5: FAILED 3D SCANS OF DISCARDED PSYCHIATRIC INSTRUMENTS, 2021. Courtesy of the artist

25/06/2026

➡️ Meet Marie Matusz - Connect India dual residency artist

Marie Matusz’s practice centres on critical engagement with forms and their inherent meanings, influenced by in-depth research into philosophical, sociological and linguistic theories. Her work manifests these concepts through minimal sculptural installations, sound works, writings and films.

For Connect India, Matusz will continue her ongoing explorations of the relationship between body, light and field by investigating their interaction when light becomes a physical quantity – measured and modelled at scales beyond human intuition.

The project Body in the Dark will draw on particle detection, specifically the conditions in which particles are registered and the traces they leave in a field – inferred from pattern and absence in near-total darkness.

Connect India is part of the Connect collaboration framework between and . Connect India is organised in partnership with , and .

Credits:
1: All Matter is Alive at its Core, 2026. 📸 Marjorie Brunet Plaza
2: Between Nostalgia and Anticipation, 2024. 📸 FIavio Pescatori, Courtesy of the artist and Clima, Milan
3: Element Anti-Element, 2026. 📸 Marjorie Brunet Plaza
4: Brutal, 2025. 📸 Studio Abbruzzese
5: Coated in Compassion, 2022. 📸 Marjorie Brunet Plaza

19/06/2026

During the first weeks of her Resonance residency at CERN , Monika Emmanuelle Kazi has immersed herself in a wide range of laboratories, experiments and research sites, guided by/alongside scientists, engineers and physicists. Her time at CERN has allowed her to explore the experiments and facilities such as the CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets) and the LMF (Large Magnet Facility), as well as CERN’s rich archives. These encounters, and the conversations they have sparked, are shaping Kazi’s evolving artistic project, Crystalline Memories.

Resonance is a partnership framework between , , and , with the support from CERN & Society Foundation.

Credits: 📸 Xenia Harder | CERN

16/06/2026

We’re delighted to announce the third edition of Connect India, a dual residency programme within Connect, the collaboration framework by Arts at CERN and Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

Artists Marie Matusz () and Moonis Ahmad Shah ()have been selected to undertake a joint residency between CERN and the ICTS (International Centre for Theoretical Sciences), with support from Science Gallery Bengaluru .

Connect India offers artists a unique opportunity to engage with cutting-edge scientific research in Geneva and Bengaluru, fostering new artistic perspectives by exposing artists to two unique scientific facilities and the fundamental research they conduct.

Congratulations to both! Find out more at the link in bio 🔗

Connect India is part of the Connect collaboration framework between and . Connect India is organised in partnership with , , and
Credits:

Marie Matusz: 📸Goldie Williams Vericain
Moonis Ahmad Shah: 📸Courtesy of the artist
Visual identity: .concept

09/06/2026

Lea Porsager, OUTRAGEOUS INTIMACY (2025, Mousse Publishing)

Lea Porsager (), 2018 Honorary Mention for Arts at CERN’s Collide international residency award, works across text, film, sculpture, and photography, using fabulation and speculation to channel cosmologies shaped by science, politics, feminism, and esotericism into tactile, time-based forms.

Drawn to both physical and metaphysical energy, Porsager constructs installations and narratives that challenge binary thinking and linear time, inviting viewers into fields of entangled meanings.

Published by Mousse Publishing () OUTRAGEOUS INTIMACY delves into Porsager’s artistic practice, documenting her work with a particular focus on her earthworks, texts, and use of readymades. Far from explanatory, the book takes form as glossolalic outbursts, in which particles, bodies, and terrains alike turn into erogenous zones and sites of sensitization.

It introduces photographs by Porsager from her journeys through CERN between 2018 and 2025 as part of the Arts at CERN programme, and in connection with her postdoctoral research.

OUTRAGEOUS INTIMACY reproduces material from CERN’s archives, while also including a series of superimposed images drawn from Porsager’s visits across CERN’s sites. Together, these pages – replete with horns, tubes, wires, aluminium foil, concrete blocks, safety signs, magnets, maps, and more – form a layered visual (and tactile) essay of the artists’ sensitive observations, and how these materials, spaces, objects, and ideas influenced the conceptual and formal language of Porsager’s multidisciplinary works.

05/06/2026

Through Arts at CERN’s global network, artists have experienced landscapes ranging from deserts to mountains, home to observatories and scientific laboratories dedicated to understanding our world and what lies far beyond it.

Beyond the cutting-edge research conducted in these places, they provide a setting for explorations, reminding us of the vastness, diversity, and fragility of the natural world that sustains us all.

1–3: Atacama desert, Northern Chile. Connect Chile residency, 2023. Photos: Dominique Koch
4–5: Jungfraujoch Sphinx Observatory, Switzerland. Connect Argentina residency, 2026. Photos: Xenia Harder | CERN
6–7: Carnarvon and SALT (Southern African Largest Telescope) in Sutherland, South Africa. Connect South Africa residency, 2021

30/05/2026

Join us tonight, Saturday 30 May for the Nuit des Musées!

For this special occasion, the will be open from 6pm to 11pm.

If you haven’t had the chance yet, come and visit Exploring the Unknown - an exhibition investigating the ambiguous relationship between technology and the ever-increasing complexity of knowledge.

On view are works by Julius von Bismarck and Benjamin Maus, Chloé Delarue , Ryoji Ikeda , and Yunchul Kim , developed following their residencies at Arts at CERN.

As residents of , their artistic practices have been nourished by their immersion in the Laboratory’s environment and the dialogues with CERN scientists on theories and ongoing experiments seeking to describe the nature of reality.

Also on display is a series of interviews with CERN scientists and the artists, expanding on this: they dive into themes such as space-time, dark matter, the voice, invisibility, and uncertainty - examining what these phenomena and concepts are, how they are studied scientifically, and how they have profoundly influenced the artists’ research and practice.

‘Exploring the Unknown’ reflects Arts at CERN’s commitment, since 2018, to supporting artistic productions, that bring together artists and physicists to foster a collaborative and interdisciplinary environment where art and science can enter into dialogue, and new ideas and approaches can be explored.

Credit: Chloé Delarue, TAFAA – TINA UNFOLLOW ALICE, 2023. Photo: Marina Cavazza.

ExploringTheUnknown

20/05/2026

Diego Tonus (.tonus): The Excavation of Thought

The Excavation of Thought (2026) is a series investigating the notion of representational landscape through processes of material extraction. The work originates from a found and damaged 35mm film strip of unknown provenance depicting labourers excavating at a mining site.

Rather than restoring the film, the project treats its celluloid surface as a landscape of erosion. Through robotic cinematography and machine-vision techniques - methods typically used to detect imperceptible events in particle physics - the film’s damaged surface is examined simultaneously as image and material object.

Central to the work is the decision not to fully develop the 35mm film. Its surface is instead treated as a site where materiality, hidden information, and partial legibility emerge through abstraction. The transformation of this material into a new film production and a series of large-scale graphene monotype prints generates both the representation of a landscape and carbon-based objects capable of functioning as conductors and energy accumulators.

The film strip operates not only as an image carrier, but as an object of investigation, connecting the advanced material’s mnemonic properties to the deteriorating analogue memory of film.

Diego Tonus’s research trip at as Guest Artist supported by Mondriaan Fonds ()

Credits 📸: DT Studio

19/05/2026

Within his artistic practice, Diego Tonus (.tonus) uses reproduction as a means to question control systems and power structures. He transforms selected images, objects, and collective experiences, placing them within new frameworks to expose their underlying codes and forms of normativity.

This approach defines a time- and process-based production articulated through sculpture, film, photography, and performance. Across these media, his practice treats archiving as an active gesture rather than an act of preservation. What is collected, ordered, or omitted becomes structural, allowing reproduction to disclose how meaning is formed, transmitted, and withheld through the politics of materials chosen, their sourcing, and use.

During his research trip at as Guest Artist, Diego Tonus observed infrastructures and robotic imaging technologies for exploring inaccessible landscapes and for representing subatomic particles, and to inquire about advanced materials. The latter opened further reflections into their implications for future technological devices, particularly in high-speed memory and energy storage systems shaping the future of memory through accelerated velocity of data sharing and storage. The dialogues with CERN scientists will inform the production of a film based on using robotic scanning and a series of large graphene monotype prints - an advanced material serving simultaneously as a carrier of memory and energy.

The research trip was supported by Mondriaan Fonds ()

1-3: Visit of the Material Lab, guided by Stefano Sgobba, Section Leader of Materials, Metrology & NDT and Katie Buchanan.
4: Analysis of Tonus’s example film in the scanner of the Emulsion Scanning Lab with Vincenzo Boccia, Vasilis Chariton and Daniele Centanni
5: Data Centre with Michael Davis, Tape Archive and Backups section leader, and Giulia Bini, Head of Arts at CERN
7-8: Robotics Workshop with Chris McGreavy and Hannes Gamper
9: CERN’s Archive with Head Archivist Olivia Mandica-Hart

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