On June 11, Kunsthalle Bern welcomes you to join the inauguration of our re-thought building with three new solo exhibitions. Inspired by the principles of permaculture and how these can re-form the art institution, our programming ecology is based on a fundamental premise: that no ground, soil or terrain is the same, so we cannot sow seeds before we understand the ground on which we walk on. Permaculture begins at zone 0: the human and her home. To propose a program that situates itself in Bern, but speaks to and of the world, we need to ask how we have arrived at the current state of our home.
Melvin Edwards’ first solo presentation in Switzerland deals with the history of race, labor and violence – concepts that are interconnected and in dialogue with historical moments: slavery and segregation in the US, the civil rights movement, Pan-Africanism, and the continuous dialogue between the cultural African diaspora, Afro-American artists, and artists of the African continent. The works range from installations made of barbed wire to complex assemblages of steel and iron – all reminiscent of agricultural and industrial materials – and the way these materials and structures haunt our present and future, steering us towards finding parallels between labor and life in the Plantationocene.
Tuli Mekondjo’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland is a newly commissioned expansive installation exploring the European collections of “crafted children”, or what in Western ethnography is called fertility dolls. Restoring fertility channels as a healing process and a way to connect with and honor her ancestors, is central to Mekondjo’s engagement with her own biography. Today these “crafted children” exist in the collections of ethnographic museums, such as the Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel in Switzerland, which graciously has lent one of these artifacts to the exhibition; a rare example of a “crafted child” with a name: Nadula.
The third exhibition by Tschabalala Self is part of a new series of exhibitions entitled RESPONSES that bring established contemporary artists to respond to our program. The series operates as a gesture and discussion between artists of various generations. Self’s work is marked by a distinctive visual language that brings the lived realities of contemporary Black life to the fore. Her response is an installation that creates a space in which her two-dimensional figures seem to live and breathe, addressing questions of identity, self-determination, and collective memory. Self’s work enters into an expanded dialogue with the themes that shape the practices of Edwards and Mekondjo: the material and symbolic conditions of Black life across the African and American continents; the entangled cultural legacies of colonialism, slavery, the Plantation and equally the resistances that emerged; through political movements and currents, be it the Civil Rights Movement, or, more recently, Black Lives Matter.
The exhibitions are curated by iLiana Fokianaki, director of Kunsthalle Bern.
The exhibition of Melvin Edwards is generously supported by Dr. Georg und Josi Guggenheim-Stiftung and Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung.
