Jerlyn Heinzen (b. 1989, Philippines) grew up in Upper Valais, Switzerland, and is currently based in Zurich. She studied Art and Media with a specialization in photography at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and completed a master in contemporary practices at the Haute École d’Art et de Design de Genève (HEAD). Heinzen co-curated the contemporary art space Zabriskie Point in Geneva. She is co-founder of the collective DOMINGO and is a member of FAAB G (a feminist, antiracist Asian collective based in Geneva.)

Working across installation that includes ceramics, photography, sonic and social-political practice, Heinzen constructs layered narratives where memory work, domestic rituals, and pop-cultural references intersect to shape modes of narration. Ceramics often become storytelling vessels: Arrangements of clay objects with fractured inscriptions, often layered with photographic transfers, invite to reflect on multitudes of meaning and the brittle and fragile nature of oral histories. Her photographic works extend this sensibility, marked by a critical, attentive gaze that lingers on the overlooked.

By attending to fractured remembrance, diasporic experience, assimilation, and the quiet politics embedded in everyday experiences, Heinzen’s work is grounded in sensitivity towards the agency materialities, gestures and linguistics hold. She treats objects not as static forms but as carriers of interwoven narration, archival traces and relationality. These offer low-threshold access to, and invite for collective exchange about multilayered and intergenerational formations of subjectivity, on times through gatherings and performative moments that centre community and shared space.

Her work resists passive reception and balances conceptual rigor with a gentle, meditative sensibility, proposing modes of attention that shift between intimacy and collectivity – suggesting that storytelling is less about fixed meaning than about socio-political practices that hold a multitude of vocabularies necessary for the weaving of uncertain and open-ended worlds.