Paolo Woods

Happy Pills

“Happiness has become a duty, and chemistry its fulfilment.” Photographer Paolo Woods and journalist Arnaud Robert spent five years travelling the world in search of “happy pills” and the promises of a society that uses the pill as the ultimate tool to overcome the limitations of human existence.

Stapferhaus

Karla Hiraldo Voleau

You Can Have It All

In “You Can Have It All”, Karla Hiraldo Voleau reflects on body dysmorphia and the healing power of art: over the course of five years, through self-portraits, rituals and performative gestures, she transformed fear into familiarity and came to see the body as a place of resistance, transformation and joy.

Müllerhaus

Varvara Uhlik

Sunshine – How Are You?

In her series, Uhlik – who was born in eastern Ukraine – explores identity caught between the Soviet past and a future of uncertainty, asking: Can the joy of memory endure, even in the face of historical trauma?

Schloss Lenzburg

Alba Ruiz Lafuente

For the leisure of working insects

“For the Leisure of Working Insects” reimagines leisure architecture as recreational structures for insects and uses irony to expose the absurdity of a world saturated with consumerism and artificiality, in which leisure becomes work and insects become a mirror of our society.

Promenade

Rodrigo Koraicho

Beach Epiphany

Since 2017, “Beach Epiphany” has been exploring Miami Beach as a place of American excess and fragile foundations, where tourism and the climate crisis, joy and alienation coexist inextricably.

Stadtmuseum Aarau

Collective Exhibition

The Taste of Travel

Drawing on archive and promotional footage, the exhibition shows how food on board Swiss trains became a collective ‘Madeleine de Proust’: a constant source of pleasure that carries a piece of the landscape with every bite.

Markus Roth-Platz

Eva O’Leary

Happy Valley

The series straddles the line between American fantasy and unsettling reality: O’Leary uses the aesthetics of advertising to expose the role models imposed on women, and the tension between the desire to be seen and the danger of being consumed.

Promenade

Antigoni Papantoni

KAIROS

“KAIROS” is a personal exploration of trauma and migration: through more than 10,000 small-format images, Antigoni Papantoni brings to light cycles of violence, denial and silence, and the difficult process of being able to re-name and transform experiences.

Müllerhaus

Juliana Gómez Quijano

Rise with the images

During her residency at the Müllerhaus in Lenzburg, Juliana Gómez Quijano created Rise with the images — a poetic visual exploration of intuition, everyday moments, and the quiet traces that shape our sense of happiness.

Schloss Lenzburg

Aline D’Auria

Never, Soon, Often, Someday

In “Never, Soon, Often, Someday”, d’Auria wanders through the landscape of the Upper Engadine, inspired by her great-grandmother’s diary: fields and flowers become quiet oracular spaces in which past and present, desire and uncertainty are reflected.

Schloss Lenzburg

Tina Sturzenegger

Add to Cart

In Tina’s work, food is both living matter and a promise: meticulously constructed sets and the advertising aesthetics of the 1960s and 70s seduce the viewer with their abundance and perfection, until a crack becomes visible and happiness is revealed as a performance, with food serving as an instrument caught between discipline and indulgence.

Seetalplatz

Mahalia Taje Giotto

Existential Boner

“Existential Boner” is a personal exploration of the body, identity and sexuality: since beginning hormone therapy in November 2020, taje has been obsessively documenting every change in their own body, and views fragmentation as both a personal and political condition, brought to life in a radical installation.

Müllerhaus

Alice Poyzer

Other Joys

“Other Joys” explores happiness as an intense, non-normative experience: in black and white, Alice Poyzer creates a visual world of personal obsessions and special interests, in which repetition becomes a strategy and joy emerges as a relational, at times exuberant force.

Müllerhaus Garden

Jakub Stanek  und Franka Frankowska

To Lead, To Follow

Two independent projects explore who shapes the image of the family: in Frankowska’s “MamaMama”, the daughter takes the lead and the mother follows, whilst in “To Do List”, Stanek interprets fatherhood as care and emotional closeness. Happiness is not portrayed as a permanent state, but as something that is built through shared experience.

Schloss Lenzburg

Martin Paar

(ALL WE NEED IS) LOVE

Martin Parr has dedicated his life to documenting human quirks, with subtle irony and a universal perspective. This exhibition is a tribute to his work and to love itself: from bored couples to passionate embraces, crowned by kitsch cakes as a caustic ode to the emotion that holds this world together.

Mülli Märt

Yael Martinez

ECHOES OF UNCERTAIN SILENCE

Since recent US policies restricting legal migration and asylum pathways, Martínez has been documenting for Médecins Sans Frontières the people stranded along the Latin American corridor: caught between unsafe return and precarious survival, between trauma and the attempt to transform memory into strength.

Stadtmuseum Aarau

Anne Morgenstern

MACHT LIEBE

“MACHT LIEBE” explores the body, desire and identity: tightly framed, sequenced images persistently deconstruct social norms and ask what makes a body beautiful, desirable or normal, and whether happiness and freedom are possible within one’s own body.

Unterpassage

Siân Davey

The garden

When Siân Davey’s son Luke transformed an abandoned garden into a space for wildflowers and community, the long-term photographic project The Garden was born. It documents how a flourishing space brings together neighbours, strangers and those in grief, becoming a metaphor for openness and belonging.

Schloss Lenzburg

Collective Exhibition

SNAPSHOTS OF HAPPINESS

The winning images of the international open call “Forever Happy” come together as a group exhibition in the shop windows of Lenzburg’s old town, turning the city itself into an open-air gallery where photography becomes a public experience.

Oldtown Lenzburg

Synthese in der Zeit

(Digital Ausstellung)

Photography takes us to places no transport can reach: the past. This digital exhibition invites you to rediscover Lenzburg along a route of 50 points in time, uncovering two railway stations, relocated streets, and vanished buildings, while tracing what has remained the same throughout.

Stadt Lenzburg und Museum Burghalde

Laura Paloma

A GENTLE INTRO TO METADATA FT FISH (DAY 789)

Two works by Laura Paloma celebrate the banality of the everyday: a copy-paste poem about metadata dressed as a Word document, and an ongoing Instagram performance posting the same fish image daily, asking: who is amateur, who is impostor, who is professional in the context of everyday digital gestures?

Tomassini, Lenzburg

Collective Exhibition

So far, so good

Inspired by the line “Jusqu’ici tout va bien” from *La Haine*, this collaboration between zb.foto Baden, Galerie 94 and the festival brings together five perspectives on the theme of life transitions: caves, weddings, retirement, drag, and leaps into the water that land gently.

Baden, Merkareal