This exhibition inaugurates a series of programing entitled Back to The Future, that will discuss climate catastrophe through activating the extensive archive of Kunsthalle Bern. After a proposition from former director of Kunsthalle Bern Bernhard Fibicher to re-enact a piece from a previous exhibition of his in 2003 by local Bernese artist George Steinmann, we thought of how questions that were asked in the past through the program of the Kunsthalle Bern are still pertinent today, and might hold answers for our future.
The intervention by artist George Steinmann, revisits his work Lofty Dryness from the 2003 group exhibition Danger Zone (Alpen) at Kunsthalle Bern curated by Fibicher, the work was concerned with the melting of the glaciers, still a burning issue in Switzerland today. Steinmann’s overall practice is characterized by thinking through ecological principles. He has worked with natural materials these last decades, producing his own pigments, collecting specimens, while photographing, painting and sketching the traces of ecocide.
Over the course of the exhibition, the entire installation will constantly change and grow, transforming past materials into the present. Steinmann imagines an art guided by the cycles and rhythms of nature, rather than the accumulation of linear, quantitative progress.
The project is part of https://artforglaciers.ch/en/