Melvin Edwards / Tuli Mekondjo / Tschabalala Self

Last month, Ibrahim Mahama wrapped Kunsthalle Bern in jute used for transporting cocoa beans: a prominent public gesture recognizing the role of Switzerland in colonial economies and the desire of the Kunsthalle to reckon with realities of past, present and future.  

On June 11, after Kunsthalle Bern has shed its jute skin, it will inaugurate its re-thought building with three new solo exhibitions introducing the first phase of its programming ecology. Inspired by the principles of permaculture and how these can re-form the art institution, the focus of our programming ecology is 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 ask: How did we arrive at the current state of our home? How do we reach a permacultural coexistence of symbiosis, equity, distribution of resources, and ultimately: ecological and social justice? 

In this first cycle of programming, the invited artists discuss these injustices of past and present through the locus of the plantation and its various manifestations and aftermaths. The plantation economy is based on forced labor of human, and non-human animals and plants, and continues in today’s agrobusiness. In that sense, the era of the plantation never ended, which has led some thinkers, such as Donna Harraway and Anna Tsing, to call our times the Plantationocene. It is the logic of the plantation that defines our present zone 0: the violated labor that unravels the possibility of home. 

Melvin Edwards’s 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, African-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. The exhibition, developed through a dialogue between artist and curator, showcases works and archival material by Hans Burkhardt, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Jayne Cortez, Ana Mendieta, Thelonious Monk, Martha Rosler, and offers glimpses into the cultural and political universe within which Edwards flourished.  

Tuli Mekondjo’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland is a new commission by Kunsthalle Bern focused on “crafted children”; what in Western ethnography is known as “fertility dolls.” The restoration of fertility channels as a healing process and a way to connect with and honor her ancestors is central to Mekondjo’s artistic engagement with her own biography. In Kunsthalle Bern, she creates an installation referencing the lost crafted children kept in museums in Switzerland and Germany. The work reflects on the colonial rule era of Namibia and how cultural objects, used in daily life, were removed from their local context by missionaries, ethnographers and travelers that either looted them, exchanged or bought them for their collections. The Plantationocene as an era not only robbed people of their labor, it also robbed them of aspects of their culture and its memory. 

The third exhibition by Tschabalala Self is opening a new series of exhibitions entitled RESPONSES that bring established contemporary artists to respond to the program. The series operates as a gesture aiming to forge discussions 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. This response is an installation that creates a space in which her two-dimensional figures live and breathe questions of identity, self-determination, and collective memory. Self’s work enters into a dialogue with the themes that also shape the practices of Melvin Edwards and Tuli Mekondjo: the material and symbolic conditions of Black life across the African and American continents; the entangled cultural legacies of colonialism and slavery, and its ultimate connections to the plantation, as well as the resistances that emerged and gave birth to cultural and political movements such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights movement, and, more recently, Black Lives Matter.  

The opening on the 11th of June includes a performance by multimedia artist, musician, composer, writer and performer JJJJJerome Ellis. The piece is a newly conceived iteration of "Music For the Garden" 2023, re-configured for the back garden of Kunsthalle Bern. Ellis's work concerns disability, justice, temporality, and historical experience and this specific work will discuss the historical traces of the movement of humans and biota betwen Switzerland and the Carribean.

The program is curated by iLiana Fokianaki, director of Kunsthalle Bern. 

Melvin Edwards is generously supported by the Dr. Georg und Josi Guggenheim-Stiftung and the Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung

Kunsthalle Bern is supported by: