Kunsthalle Bern is honored to present its summer program: the first solo exhibition of artist Tai Shani in Switzerland, the first part of a newly commissioned opera series by Jota Mombaça and its annual artistic RESPONSES contribution to our summer program, featuring a performance by Ivan Cheng.

Additionally, we are proud to announce a new program of art in the public space in collaboration with Museumsquartier Bern and the Bernisches Historisches Museum entitled Horizon of Forms, honoring the legacy of former director Harald Szeemann, inaugurated by Swiss artist Vanessa Billy.

The exhibitions articulate a continuum between geology, body, and infrastructure. What emerges is a shared critical framework in which climate, violence, and technology and their crises are understood not as separate, but as interdependent conditions.

Shani and Mombaça both explore how systems of power decide whose lives, voices, and deaths are acknowledged—and whose are ignored—across human and nonhuman worlds. The idea of 'ungrievability' connects their work: both artists create layered, collective sound environments that move away from the single human voice and instead present voice as shared, ghostly, and mediated. Together, their projects critique global modernity while also imagining other ways of feeling, mourning, and resisting within and against these systems.

Vanessa Billy’s Superconductors connects to Shani and Mombaça's work through its focus on the material and infrastructural systems that shape perception, voice, and visibility, showing how networks of circulation influence what can be heard, seen, and recognised.