Share certificates
Help us support the Kunsthalle by buying a share in art, and in an institution dedicated to preserving and making it possible.
Since 2001 the Kunsthalle has been issuing share certificates with a face value of fifty, a hundred or five hundred Swiss francs. The shares are both works by the artist Maria Eichhorn and a means of contributing towards the Kunsthalle’s upkeep. They are also a material portion of our building, which the buyer acquires upon purchasing them. As such they continue the long-standing tradition of personalised share certificates valued at fifty, a hundred and five hundred francs which our board of trustees has issued since 1912 to finance and maintain the building at Helvetiaplatz 1. In volume one of her publication Das Geld der Kunsthalle Bern, Maria Eichhorn writes, “The project consists in analysing the Kunsthalle’s economic relations, representing them in a particular way and applying them on different levels.”
The share certificates are an expression of our board of trustees’ fundamental democratic vision – that we progress by working together. The Kunsthalle itself was founded in 1918 by a collective effort of the city’s artists. In 1969 the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form transformed the Kunsthalle into a collective studio of sixty-nine artists. In 2007, the then director, Philippe Pirotte, posed the question: can a relatively small group exhibition still formulate a significant statement in an artistic climate where the scale of mega-events like art fairs and biennials set the tone? In response, he and over seventy artists organised the auction No Leftovers, the proceeds of which have supported the work of the Kunsthalle’s directors up until last year. In our anniversary publication Im Tun (2018), we together with twenty-five artists looked back over the Kunsthalle’s last twenty-five years. Or as the American cultural theorist Fred Moten put it, “to consent not to be a single being” (2017). For the fact is that making art is collaborative, and emerges from the bonds between us.