The film screening program When Rain Clouds Gather discusses artistic imaginaries for possible futures, contemplating social and environmental justice. The series presents an overview of artistic practices that address the different imaginaries and responses that shape how we envision a climatic and more just future. Inspired by the homonymous novel of Bessie Head, the novel is a tale of hope amidst despair, inspiring us to think of possible futures with care and determination, against the damning reality of climate catastrophe. 

The program begins with the co-authored works of acclaimed philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva and artist Arjuna Neuman. In the past decade, the duo has been working on a film series entitled Elemental Cinema, consisting of four films, that will be screened for a period of one month at the Kunsthalle Bern.

Each film in the series Elemental Cinema is dedicated to one of the four elements. In it, the artists have developed an approach that takes matter, material, and the elemental as its starting point – aspects which continue to be neglected and suppressed by the globally dominant order of thinking and being. Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s work undermines patterns of thinking about and relating to the Earth that have been shaped by European colonial modernity. They show that categories and distinctions that seem self-evident in the Global West underlie a profoundly unequal, racist world. Neuman and Ferreira da Silva‘s work experiments with thinking and sensing simultaneously the various moments of material existence: the quantic, cosmic, organic/mechanic, historic/geologic. It often departs from a particular site, but then moves through and weaves together various times and places to show the planetary scope and historical depth of pressing geopolitical issues.

16 JULY 2024, 6 pm:
Launch of the event series with an introduction by iLiana Fokianaki (director of Kunsthalle Bern) followed by first screening of Serpent Rain (2016).

The film series will be screened the following days – weather permitting, in the garden of the Kunsthalle – at 7 & 7.30 p.m.:

Film 1: Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, Serpent Rain, 2016
17 – 21 JULY 2024

Film 2: Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy, 2019
24 – 28 JULY 2024

Film 3: Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum, 2020
14 – 18 AUGUST 2024

FIlm 4: Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, 2023
21 – 25 AUGUST 2024