Vera Zurbrügg

Vera Zurbrügg is a Swiss artist based between London and Basel. She obtained a PhD from the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, in 2025. Her practice-led research focuses on Switzerland’s contested role during the Second World War and its influence on the Swiss national identity. Vera uses an aesthetic of the secret through conceptual readings of objects and material interventions to analyse the impact of state secrecy on collective memory and to critically examine the inherent power dynamics and ideological underpinnings of historical knowledge production. Through a counter-archive of collected and gilded objects, she interrogates the archive as a historical apparatus, following processes of selection and discrimination. Vera is co-founder of RAKE – a visual research collective that uses open-source data to investigate a variety of unseen and obscured elements in society, business, and politics. Additionally, she is a member of the Secrecy, Power and Ignorance Network (SPIN), a collaborative initiative of researchers focusing on the lasting – sometimes violent – implications of deliberate acts of obfuscation, as well as ARCHIVO, a platform dedicated to photography and visual cultures to study their impact on our understanding of the past.