Hannah Villiger graduated from the University of Applied Arts of Luzern in 1974, and is known internationally for her photographic work. The artist started using this medium exclusively as from 1980 to show a fragmented depiction of her own naked body, first with a 35 mm camera, then with a Polaroid. In no way narcissistic, her work treats the body as an anonymous material, far from the identitary issues tackled by an artist like Valie Export. Consistently defining herself as a sculptress, she presented enlarged photographs in dynamic ensembles (Block, 1993-1994) in order to reveal the intrinsic properties of a body shaped by its digital recording. Villiger moved to Paris in 1986.

Her work was shown in a number of international exhibitions and she represented Switzerland at the São Paulo Biennale in 1994. In 1996, she began working on the series Skulptural, in which we see her body, emaciated and weakened by chronic lung illness and intertwined with fabric. A comprehensive annotated catalogue of her work was published on the occasion of a major retrospective held at Kunsthalle Basel in 2001.