Edgar Calel / Lin May Saeed

Kunsthalle Bern is excited to present the first solo exhibitions in Switzerland, of Guatemalan artist Edgar Calel (b. 1987, Chi Xot, San Juan Comalapa) and the late German-Iraqi artist Lin May Saeed (1973–2023).

The two artistic practices are in dialogue with the ongoing research of director iLiana Fokianaki into the Plantationocene, aiming to frame contemporary social and environmental injustice as the legacy of past and present extractive systems, that organize land, labor, and life through regimes of exploitation and control.

Calel’s practice brings Indigenous Maya epistemologies into direct conversation with global contemporary art’s concerns on climate catastrophe. Rooted in his Kaqchikel Maya heritage, and the eons long cosmovision of the Mayans, Calel’s sculptures and installations often incorporate everyday and symbolic materials—textiles, stones, organic matter, and found objects—assembled through processes that echo communal labor and ancestral practices. Rather than offering fixed meanings, his work challenges the Western notion that Indigenous culture and its cosmologies is a thing of the past, bringing to the fore its active presence and political potency. For his new commissioned exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, Calel draws from fables and parabels of Guatemalan rural life, to discuss conditions of labour in the contemporary plantations of Guatemala. The country’s agricultural landscape is dominated by large-scale, export-driven plantations, primarily coffee, a historic sector with notable, high-altitude, volcanic farms being a key economic pillar. The country has also monoculture plantations of sugar, bananas and palm oil, the latter alone today covering more than 500.000 acres, altering the landscape and depleting the soil, causing deforestation and lack of resources.

Within this condition, Edgar Calel’s new work on collective labour and the unseen efforts of Guatemalan communities within a landscape of multinational extraction and exploitation, to uphold land and labour rights in his native Guatemala—is poignant. The presentation is drawing a pointed comparison between human laborers and ants—foregrounding the normalization and erasure of collective toil, disposability, and obedience as structural necessities of plantation logics. In dialogue with this, the late Lin May Saeed’s practice offers a radical reimagining of interspecies relations, unsettling hierarchies that separate human from animal and exposing the ethical violence embedded in systems that instrumentalize living beings. Together, these positions articulate the Plantationocene not only as a historical framework but as an ongoing condition that shapes bodies, labor, and ecological relations, while opening space for resistance, care, and alternative modes of coexistence. Through his installation, Edgar Calel offers a call to reconsider how histories are told, whose knowledge is valued, and how art can function as a space of highlighting the injustices and enviromental harm imposed on both earth and humans for the sake of overconsumption and profit.

Lin May Saeed developed a visual language that foregrounded animals as political subjects and agents of collective life, mostly manifested through drawings, reliefs and freestanding sculptures. Her sculptures stage scenes of care, revolt, mourning, and joy, imagining worlds in which humans and non-human animals exist in relations of solidarity rather than domination. In these speculative narratives, animals are neither allegories nor decorative passive figures, but protagonists whose presence disrupts the human-centered canon of art history.

Most importantly, Saeed’s overall oeuvre questions the philosophical and political structures that separate “the human” from other forms of life. By refusing both sentimentality and violence, Saeed proposed an ethics grounded in vulnerability, interdependence, and shared survival. Her practice was deeply informed by anti-speciesist, feminist, and posthumanist theory, resonating with thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Elias Canetti, who influenced her approach in building worlds that depict how non-human animals influence and define human social behavior long before ideologies, states and nations have.

Lin May Saeed’s work invites viewers to imagine alternative futures—ones shaped not by extraction and control, but by care, resistance, and multispecies coexistence. Her practice remains a vital contribution to contemporary debates on ecology, ethics, and the political imagination of art.

The exhibitions are curated by iLiana Fokianaki, director Kunsthalle Bern
Assistant curator: Claudia Heim

The exhibition of Edgar Calel is kindly supported by the Dr. Georg und Josi Guggenheim-Stiftung