WIND STORMS RAINBOW

Michael Asher, Eugen Gorminger, Susan Hiller, RÚRÍ, Denis Savary

Drawing on works from the KBCB collection and inspired by La Dépendance’s residency at the Studiolo, the exhibition presents a series of works characterised by meteorological observations and all possessing a strong conceptual dimension.

The Californian artist Michael Asher (1943–2012) began his career in the late 1960s, during a post-minimalist era. The floor plan in Bottom: Velocity + Volume Pomona (1970) presents an installation he realised in 1970 at the Pomona College Museum of Art (now the Benton Museum of Art) in Claremont, California. Inside the museum, Asher added walls and removed doors to allow for the circulation of sound, air and light, as well as constant access – day and night. In this way, Asher adopted certain principles of Minimalism, directing visitors’ attention directly to their surroundings rather than to a specific object. His installations can thus be read as socio-political critiques that combine site-specific interventions with institutional critique.

The Swiss-Bolivian Eugen Gomringer (1925–2025) is regarded by many as one of the founding fathers of concrete poetry, an international movement at the intersection of literature and the visual arts, which emerged in the 1950s. In 1953, Gomringer published his first ‘Constellations’: minimalist poems without syntax, always set in the ‘Helvetica’ typeface and written in lower-case letters. Through this radical reduction, he developed poems consisting of a single word. This is also the case with wind (1953), in which the letters of the word, repeated and arranged in different directions, create a multidimensional reading. The gaze, so to speak, ‘blows’ across the white of the poster.

The Icelandic multimedia artist Rúrí (*1951) has, for fifty years, been developing a body of work strongly influenced by the socio-geographical context of Iceland, where she grew up. The work Rainbow (1983) is at once an ephemeral sculpture, a performance and a video. The artist herself says: ‘The rainbow appears out of nowhere, lasts only a few moments and then disappears just as suddenly as it appeared. No one can catch it or even come close to it, and yet for most people it holds a very special value.’

The series Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1982) by the American-British artist Susan Hiller (1940–2019) presents a collection of postcards that the artist had gathered, depicting the raging sea as it crashes against the coast, creating spectacular sprays of water. This motif, which is widespread along the entire British coastline, is the result of an industry in which only women were employed, who coloured these images by hand without ever being acknowledged. The title refers to these many anonymous female artists. Dedicated to the Unknown Artist thus combines a technical and social history with the highly romantic motif of the storm.

Exhibited alongside Susan Hiller 2025 at the KBCB, the Swiss artist Denis Savary (*1981) sought to pay homage to her by creating a sculptural and acoustic work entitled Susan (2026). One of Susan Hiller’s iconic works, entitled Die Gedanken sind frei (2012), takes the form of a jukebox whose music selection consists exclusively of political songs from various cultures and eras. Denis Savary, who continues to take an interest in the recording of meteorological phenomena, as well as in listening devices and folklore, has in turn compiled a jukebox featuring 125 tracks (music, singing, recordings) that evoke severe weather. These tracks come from two different collections: the ethnomusicological collection of the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève (selected by Madeleine Leclair, curator at the MEG) and the archive of the techno music festival ‘Berlin Atonal’ (selected by Paul R Levant, co-programmer of the festival).

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Christian Bernard (1950–2026), the founder and first director of MAMCO, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Geneva.

—Paul Bernard, Directeur KBCB

Michael Asher,
Bottom: Velocity + Volume Pomona, 1970
Blueprint
coll. KBCB, Biel/Bienne

Eugen Gomringer,
wind, 1953
Siebdruck
Privatsammlung

Rúrí,
Rainbow, 1983
Video, 1’54”
court. der Künstlerin

Susan Hiller,
Dedicated to the Unknown Artists, 1982
Maschinengeschriebenes Blatt, Postkarten
coll. KBCB, Biel/Bienne

Denis Savary,
Susan, 2026
Jukebox
coll. KBCB, Biel/Bienne