Ibrahim Mahama

Just before the Kunsthalle Bern opens up its updated building, which will be more safe and accessible to our audiences, we are about to wrap ourselves in a literal and theoretical chrysalis, through a public art work that will be revealed in late April 2025. We choose the word chrysalis for its transformative connotations, like the chrysalis turns into a butterfly, we hope to direct to this transformative journey of an institution that opens its course towards new directions.  
By breaking through the chrysalis, Kunsthalle Bern aims to demonstrate entering a new form and phase. The public art project is conceived by acclaimed Ghanian artist Ibrahim Mahama, who will respond to Christo’s wrapping of the Kunsthalle in the summer of 1968. We are thus extremely pleased to present Mahama’s first Swiss solo exhibition.  
This is a historic moment for Kunsthalle Bern as the building is changing for the first time since its inception, and thus also the time for us to reflect on the legacy of our program. This is an ambitious proposal for us, that references the imprint of the Kunsthalle Bern on national and local memory, and the impact it has had to the city’s architectural and artistic landscape: as a space for transformative and radical propositions. But it is also a comment on the Eurocentric focus of the Kunsthalle during those decades, aiming to now propose new dialogues, cooperation and understanding of different perspectives, positions and experiences. The work of Mahama accurately highlights the relationships of Switzerland to the world, and more specifically its mercantile connections then and now.