
Timo Paris
Timo Paris is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice brings dance—particularly breaking—into dialogue with visual media such as drawing, sculpture, film, and installation. His work centers on the body as both an experiencing subject and a formable object, examining how movement, perception, and image-making intersect. Positioned between performance, visual art, and spatial inquiry, his practice explores how bodies and identities are shaped by medial, architectural, and technological conditions.
Timo Paris’ artistic practice operates at the intersection of dance, visual art, and performative research. Taking the body as both an experiencing subject and a material form, his work investigates movement, perception, and image production across different media. Through a process-driven, cross-medial approach, Paris translates embodied experience into drawing, sculpture, film, installation, and performance, treating these not as separate disciplines but as interrelated fields. His works examine how perception and identity are shaped by spatial, social, and technological conditions, and critically engage with the increasing shift from embodied knowledge toward its mediated representations. Within this framework, movement functions not only as a performative act but as a method of inquiry, transforming bodily presence into temporal, spatial, and visual structures.
My artistic practice is grounded in a process-based investigation of the body in motion and its translation into visual, spatial, and medial forms. The body operates simultaneously as a site of experience and as an image-bearing object: as a subject that perceives, acts, and remembers, and as a form that can be shaped, fragmented, and represented. From this tension emerges a body of work that understands movement not primarily as expression, but as a method of knowledge production.
Central to my work is the question of how embodied knowledge is generated, how it inscribes itself into images, lines, volumes, or temporal structures, and how these translations affect our perception of identity, presence, and space. Dance—particularly breaking—does not function as a closed discipline within this practice, but as a point of departure for a cross-medial approach in which movement is transferred into drawing, sculpture, film, installation, and performance. These media are not treated as separate fields, but as different states of the same embodied experience.
A recurring concern in my work is the increasing shift from immediate, sensory experience toward mediated images of the body. In a contemporary condition shaped by technological apparatuses, architectural frameworks, and digital representations, the body is increasingly defined through its image. I am interested in how these conditions structure perception, what forms of conditioning they produce, and where moments of friction, rupture, or resistance may arise. My works explore these tensions by placing the body in situations where it leans into, works against, or is shaped by spatial and material structures.
Although visual media play a central role, my attention is deliberately directed toward non-visual dimensions of perception: weight, pressure, friction, balance, breath, temporal dilation, and internal states. Movement becomes a tool to access and articulate these qualities, giving them form without fully fixing them. The resulting works are not conceived as definitive statements, but as situational articulations within an ongoing dialogue between body, space, and imagination.
In this sense, I understand my practice as a search for forms that do not replace bodily experience, but condense and transform it. Rather than explaining perception, the work aims to shift it—toward an attentiveness to what unfolds in the thresholds between movement and image, presence and representation, body and environment.
CV
Education
2022–2024 Master of Fine Arts, Institut Kunst, Gender und Natur, HGK FHNW, Basel
2016–2020 Bachelor of Fine Arts, HGK FHNW, Basel
2014–2015 Foundation Course, School of Design Basel
Solo Exhibitions (Selection)
2024 Keep A Blind Eye, BC Gallery, Basel
2023 SCRUPUS, Neuf Trois, Basel
2023 Proof of Work, Der TANK, HGK FHNW, Basel
Group Exhibitions (Selection)
2025 Boten & Stoffe, Villa Renata, Basel
2024 You Can Break a Rock With an Egg, Kunsthaus Baselland
2024 DUENDE, Atelier Mondial
2022 Tripple Take, Wilde Gallery, Basel
2021 Raumfahrt V, Museum Langmatt, Baden
Screenings & Film Awards (Selection)
SCRUPUS and La tête dans les étoiles have received over 40 international awards and nominations across experimental, dance, and art film festivals.
2024 Selection for Best Emerging Artist of the Year | CAMBRIDGE Film Critics Awards
2024 Best Original Dance Film & Best International Art House Director | New Yorker Indie Critics Choice Awards 2024
2024 Best international Young Director, Best Experimental, Grand Prix of Italy, Venice
2024 Best Dance Movie| Spain international Film Awards
2024 Best Experimental Film, Milan Gold Awards
2024 Best Indie Author of the Year | 8&Half Awards Special Event in Cannes
(→ Hinweis: auf der Website stark gekürzt, vollständige Liste im PDF)
Grants & Residencies
2026 Research Grant: Signature Moves – MoCap and the Disembodied Form of Dance
2025 Full Residency Grant, HANGAR, Lisbon
2022 Full Scholarships, Master Studies (various foundations)
2024 Production Grant: Sounddesign SCRUPUS
2022 Research Grant: SCRUPUS
Artist Talks & Lectures (Selection)
2025 Perspectives on Movement, Space, and Technology, Chinati Foundation, Marfa
2023 Thessaloniki International Screendance Festival
2023 Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina, Lima
Publications & Press (Selection)
2027 Meditations on Movement, Space, and Technology
2024 360° Kultur, Telebasel
2021 Sculpture II, Arthur Serfaty
2021 Exhibition booklet Raumfahrt V, Museum Langmatt
Professional Development (Selection)
2024 Online Course, MagnusClass – Art Market Strategies
2025 Artist Accelerator Program, Martha May Ronson (ongoing)
Download
→ Download CV (extended version PDF)
