Summer program 2026

Kunsthalle Bern is excited to present its summer program: the first solo exhibition of artist Tai Shani in Switzerland, the first part of a new commissioned project by Jota Mombaça and its annual artistic RESPONSES contribution to our summer program with a performance by Ivan Cheng. Additionally, Swiss artist Vanessa Billy inaugurates a new initiative of art in the public space in an attempt to make the walls of the Kunsthalle permeable, entitled Horizon of Forms.

The summer exhibition program articulates 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.

The exhibition compost (continuum) by Jota Mombaça is produced in collaboration with Kunsthalle Bern, Sonsbeek Biennial 2026 (Arnhem, NL), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai, CN), and Inhotim Museum (Brumadinho, BR). For the exhibition, Mombaça works in close collaboration with the Colombian-Canadian singer and songwriter Lido Pimienta, the composer Pedro Santiago, as well as a growing network of musicians, activists, and academics to articulate an interdisciplinary body of work that weaves together sound, poetry, installation, drawing, and sculpture. 

Drawing from elemental theory, Elizabeth Povinelli’s notion of “geontology,” compost (continuum) critically exposes the extractive legacy of Swiss companies in South America, specifically coal extraction at sites such as the Cerrejón Mine—the largest coal mine in the world, located in the Guajira region of Colombia. The project articulates a critical speculation on the continuities between the destruction of South American native landscapes and the melting of glaciers in Switzerland. Infused with a poetics of geological time and planetary memory, it examines the harsh realities of the global climate catastrophe. It further reframes extractivism as a politics of perception—one that renders minerals, landscapes, colonized territories as inert, exploitable, and ultimately “ungrievable”.  

This resonates with Tai Shani’s newly commissioned MIASMA: Moral Injury in the Apocalyptic Sunsets of Modernity disAssociation, a necropolitical reading of Antigone, pointing on who counts as mournable, and who can be abandoned to oblivion. In a time marked by collective mourning for the intertwined destruction of environments and lives, Shani’s revisiting of the seminal Greek tragedy feels urgent and incisive. 

Through such a lens, the adaptation centres on the “ungrievability” of Polynikes’ corpse as an avatar for those rendered ungrievable within contemporary deathworlds. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, these deathworlds—that manifest through forced displacement, due to wars such in the case of Palestine, or the climate crisis and unequal distribution of resources such as in Sudan— are structured by forms of power that claim the "right to kill", extract and destroy, producing conditions of both fast and slow violence. Within this framework, Antigone emerges as a lucid conduit through which the psychic toll of moral injury can be articulated in the face of resurgent authoritarianism and fascism. At the same time, the work frames resistance and radical love as forms of spiritual and ethical practice, gestures that situate human struggle within a broader, even cosmic, scale. 

At first glance, compost (continuum) by Jota Mombaça and Tai Shani’s M.I.A.S.M.A. seem to operate in distinct registers—one grounded in planetary materiality and extractivism, the other in myth, tragedy, and necropolitics. Yet they converge around a shared theoretical concern: how regimes of power distribute death, silence, and legibility across both human and more-than-human worlds. Both projects construct choral, polyphonic environments that challenge the idea of a singular, authoritative truth authorship. In both exhibitions, voice is dislocated from the individual human subject and reassembled as something collective, spectral, and mediated—suggesting that witnessing and mourning could also become distributed practices. Together, the two projects articulate a shared critique of global modernity as a system that produces both ecological devastation and necropolitical exclusion, while also gesturing toward alternative modes of sensing, grieving, and resisting within—and against—it. 

For this year's RESPONSES, where an artist is invited to respond to the summer cycle of exhibitions, Kunsthalle Bern welcomes Ivan Cheng. Cheng will present one of his characteristic “filmed situations' on the 18th of June. The Amsterdam-based, Australian artist deploys performance as a technology where voice, subjectivity, and recognition are always unstable, distributed, and shaped by systems of power.

Vanessa Billy’s Superconductors inaugurates a new series of outdoor commissions in the city of Bern, entitled Horizon of Forms. The sculptural intervention discusses the infrastructural domain materially embedded in our built environments, by focusing on cables, networks, and conductive materials that underwrite contemporary life. Her use of copper, aluminium, and optical fibres points directly back to extractive economies. What appears in Superconductors as elegant, almost vegetal growth is in fact the surface of deeply entangled global supply chains—linking the technological present to histories of dispossession and environmental degradation. Billy’s cable-bundles suggest infrastructures designed to transmit signals, voices, and data, yet typically rendered invisible. By bringing these conduits into public space, Superconductors makes perceptible the conditions through which communication—and by extension, recognition and grievability as in the works of Shani and Mombaça—circulates or is withheld. 

The program articulates a continuum between geology, body, and infrastructure. Mombaça attends to the deep time of matter and its extraction; Shani to the governance of life, death, and mourning; and Billy to the conductive systems that bind these scales together in the present. What emerges is a shared critical framework in which climate catastrophe, necropolitical violence, and technological modernity are understood not as separate crises, but as interdependent conditions—structured by the same logics of exploitation, circulation, and control. 

Curated by iLiana Fokianaki, director Kunsthalle Bern
Assistant curator Claudia Heim