Ursula Palla is known for her subtle, materially sensitive installations that give quiet attention to life at the edge of perception—plants, animals, and forms that resist clear classification. Working with ephemeral materials such as snow, sugar, weeds, bronze, and gun, she constructs environments that hover between presence and disappearance. Her works are not declarations but conditions—fragile, temporal, and unresolved.
The figures and forms she presents—melting snowmen, motionless birds, bronze-cast weeds, ants dismantling currency, or a horse walking endlessly—do not function as metaphors or symbols. They are beings caught in systems that do not fully register their presence. They persist, not through assertion, but through quiet endurance. They are visible, but not recognized. The exhibition title, Threshold Lives: On Presence without Recognition, points to this condition: lives that exist at the boundary of meaning, where presence is not matched by status or attention. These are not lives entirely excluded, nor fully embraced. They are tolerated, managed, or aestheticized but never fully seen. There are conceptual echoes here of Giorgio Agamben’s idea of bare life, in which beings are included in systems of control only through their exclusion from meaning or protection. While Palla’s penetrated subject- nature, is not directly reducible to this condition (nature, after all, is often protected, regulated, even romanticized), her work nonetheless opens a space to reflect on similar structures. The lives she renders are not abandoned, but they are misread, misclassified, or left without resonance. Their illegibility is not legal, but aesthetic and systemic.
Across these works, Palla constructs a quiet vocabulary for lives that remain unrecognized. She does not rescue, explain, or aestheticize these presences. Instead, she brings forth the unresolved, the unnamed, and the unclaimed—forms of life that resist being reduced to familiar categories. What she offers is not visibility as validation, but a space in which ambiguity is allowed to endure.
Threshold Lives: On Presence Without Recognition asks not for resolution but for attention. It invites us to dwell alongside that which we cannot easily read, to adopt a position not of mastery but of presence. The works do not speak for what they show, and yet they leave us with a question that cannot be ignored:
Have you truly seen this life—or have you simply looked away?
EXHIBITING WORKS
![]() Snow People 3 Crystal glass 10 pieces, various size 2023 | ![]() Balance Video beamer, USB stick, box,wire 47 x 45 x 32cm, 4’ Edition 3 of 3 + 2AP 2013 | ![]() Bird 3 Gypsum feet, video projector, move box 95 x 50 x 12 cm, 6’ Edition 3 of 3 + 2AP 2013 |
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![]() Empty Garden 3 32 Plants cast in bronze, video beamer, HD Player Dimension variable 2020-2022 | ![]() Herb and Weeds 92 Bronze patinated 32 x 12 x 17 cm 2022 | ![]() Herb and Weeds 109 Bronze patinated 51 x 14.5 x 14 cm 2022 |
![]() Herb and Weeds 114 Bronze patinated 39 x 23 x 26 cm 2022 | ![]() Herb and Weeds 133 Bronze patinated 14.5 x 15 x 52 cm 2022 | ![]() Herb and Weeds 158 Bronze patinated 14 x 13 x 53 cm 2023 |
![]() Remains - Nested Video, HD, 16:9, without sound, Found objects (Wire, wood plastic) Dimension variable, 5’35’’ 2023 | ![]() Great White 2 Video, 16:9, Stereo-Sound Dimension Variable, 3’22’’ Edition 4 of 5 + 2AP 2018 | ![]() Thousands 2 12 videos on monitors 180 x 180 x 60 cm, 3’-5’ Edition 5 of 5 + 2AP 2014 |
![]() The Horse Video projector, HD player, 2 speakers 300 x 250 cm, 9’ Edition 3 of 5 + 2AP 2013 | ![]() Fireweed Bronze with steel weapons, patinated 186 x 29 x 26 cm 2014 | ![]() Herons 1+2 2022 Aluminum 75 x 36 x 32 cm 2022 |
![]() Landscape 5 3200 fish hooks, transparent wire Dimensions variable 2013-2022 | ![]() Flower 4 3 Channel Video Installation Dimensions variable 2003-2024 |
Artists

Ursula Palla
b. 1961, Chur, Switzerland
Ursula Palla’s artistic practice weaves together video and spatial installations, incorporating delicate materials such as molded sugar, coal dust, and snow. Her work explores the fragile balance of nature and wildlife, seducing viewers with an enchanting aesthetic while carrying an urgent underlying message. Extensive research forms the foundation of her art, revealing the depth and complexity of its themes upon closer examination.
Palla’s poetic yet unsettling installations evoke a haunting sense of absence, prompting reflection on humanity’s responsibility toward the environment. Her early works focused on the human figure, exploring themes of appearance and disappearance. Since 2000, her focus has shifted toward the plant and animal world, highlighting the increasing artificiality of nature as a central concern in her multimedia practice.
Palla’s works have been exhibited internationally, with recent solo shows at Galerie Gisèle Linder (Switzerland, 2025), Fontein, Zürich (Switzerland, 2025), and Tang Contemporary Art (South Korea, 2024).