Sung Tieu and Gala Porras-Kim

Kunsthalle Bern is proud to announce its fall exhibition program, which continues the examination of how colonial tropes still dictate the way we understand life and culture in the Plantationocene. 

For her solo exhibition Bleed at Kunsthalle Bern, Sung Tieu continues her ongoing enquiries into architectures of power embedded in institutional and bureaucratic frameworks—structures that have shaped statecraft, historiography, and the global distribution of knowledge. For her commission she centres herfocus on Switzerland’s entanglement in colonial economies, particularly through the rubber trade in Vietnam and the scientific gains extracted from colonised territories, which contributed to the advancement of Western medicine and industry.

Tieu brings to the fore the life story of Swiss-born physician and bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin. Working in Vietnam in the 1890s, Yersin identified the bacterium responsible for the bubonic plague, co-founded the École de Médecine de Hanoi, and imported and introduced the cultivation of rubber and quinine trees. These initiatives laid the groundwork for the establishment of rubber plantations across the country—most notably those operated by Michelin, which in 1925 opened the largest rubber plantation and factory in Vietnam, remaining under corporate control until nationalisation in 1975.

A muted yellow hue permeates the exhibition. The colour is charged with contradictory histories: in Vietnam yellow has long been tied to imperial authority and sovereignty, while in the Western imagination, it became a racialized, derogatory shorthand for Asian bodies. Tieu brings these tensions to the fore, drawing out different empires’ visual codes, their taxonomies, and their lingering resonance.

Additionally, the artist conceived a new, long-term rooftop installation that extends the chromatic visual code of the exhibition beyond the constraints of the building.

In two new video works, Tieu interweaves archival footage of Michelin’s plantation history—including its militarization by the U.S. Army during the war in Vietnam —with recordings of herself and Kunsthalle staff dining at Michelin-starred restaurants in Bern. The juxtaposition lays bare links between colonial infrastructure and contemporary culinary culture, exposing the latent violence in systems of taste, prestige, and refinement.

A new series of aluminium sculptures produced locally, draws on 12th-century pre-modern metric systems once used in Bern. Using her own body as a measurement unit, Tieu creates forms that recall both tools of calibration and instruments of restraint—highlighting how standardization has long operated as a mechanism of control, discipline, and punishment. Bleed reflects on the afterlives of plantation economies and the infrastructures that sustained them, asking how their logics continue to shape the regulation, measurement, and consumption of bodies today—within a global condition we call Plantationocene. 

Colombian-Korean-American artist Gala Porras-Kim's first solo exhibition in Switzerland considers how institutional frameworks define, legitimise and preserve collections and cultural heritage. By examining the perpetuation of systems of classification through the continuation of colonial tropes in cataloguing and conservation, Porras-Kim highlights how even today museums reflect and reinforce specific ideologies and European systems of knowledge. Her works investigate how objects, displaced through archeological extraction, are transformed once they enter collections. Removed from their original contexts, they are made to serve new narratives of preservation, interpretation, and power even to this day.

Rather than accepting these conditions, Porras-Kim imagines alternative modes of stewardship. Through her work the artist opens up spaces to view how objects retain their original functions and cultural presence. In doing so, she reveals museums not as neutral repositories of knowledge but as contested sites, where the stories of objects, communities, and institutions collide. By reframing museum display as an active agent in shaping cultural memory, but also in altering the way we understand art and culture at large, she highlights the contradictions within institutional practices and for more open-ended approaches to stewardship.

For her presentation at Kunsthalle Bern, Porras-Kim’s work opens alternative imaginaries for rethinking the conditions of artworks within the white cube, and investigates how decisions around museum displays can act as both a site of preservation and of erasure. In the exhibition Porras-Kim incorporates living matter, such as clay, sediment, and silt from the wetlands of the Yucatán Peninsula, or ash from the fire of the National Museum of Brazil, as well as dust collected from the Peabody Museum in the United States, inviting the elements to interact with water, humidity, matter and infrastructures, thus actively looking at the idea of museums as sterile spaces and using the rules of display as her subject matter. Through installations and sculptural speculative proposals, Porras-Kim asks what it would mean to broaden institutional logics—foregrounding the cultural, spiritual, and political contexts that are often stripped away when objects are isolated in vitrines or storage.

Sung Tieu: Bleed is kindly supported by the Shikishima Foundation and Gesellschaft zu Zimmerleuten

Kunsthalle Bern is supported by Kultur Stadt Bern