Ohan Breiding: Belly of a Glacier, an experimental film and photographic installation at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass Moca), reflects memories literally frozen in time. In collaboration with the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), the exhibition (until 14 December) is an intimate portrait of Switzerland’s Rhône Glacier, which scientists predict will be gone by the year 2050, melting prematurely due to climate change. The show highlights the current state of climate emergency with a unique look at the untimely melting of this ancient glacier—from life on its surface to its rarely seen icy belly below.
Dating back to at least 11,700BC, the roughly five-mile long Rhône Glacier is located in the south of the Swiss Alps, by the Furka Pass in Valais near the Italian border. It is the fifth-longest glacier in Switzerland, and water from the Rhône Glacier feeds the river Rhône, which flows into the Mediterranean Sea near Marseille. The 12,000ft-high glacier has lost around 33ft of thickness annually in the past decade alone.
In the larger scheme of things, Climate Action Tracker research shows that even if every country involved in the Paris Agreement were to reach its climate goals, global average temperatures would still be well above the goal (1.5 degrees Celsius) by the end of the century. “None of us was prepared for what it would feel like to open this show in this exact moment with what we’re facing in climate disasters across the world,” says Lisa Dorin, the WCMA’s deputy director and curatorial partner.
Breiding, a Swiss American artist, is also an art professor at Williams College. They employ a trans-feminist lens to the discussion of ecological care. Their experimental half-hour film and over 100 photos give audiences a poetic view of the glacier as a dying patient in its declining years, revealing centuries of memories held within its ice.
“Putting all these images together, we are all able to see something that feels quite monumental,” Breiding says, “but I’m hoping, at the same time, very intimate.”
Ohan Breiding’s To dress a wound from the light that shines from it (2023) Courtesy the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams
With the grandeur of the Swiss Alps as its backdrop, the film Belly of a Glacier (2024) captures the efforts of the residents of Obergoms, Switzerland, to drape the nearby Rhône Glacier with thermal blankets, attempting to insulate it from rising temperatures. (This practice has recently been abandoned after it was deemed unable to prevent the glacier’s fate, Breiding says.) With very little narration in the film, Breiding lets the glacier tell the story visually and with sound. While animals search for water, the audience hears ice melting.
“As an artist, my intention was to slow down time,” Breiding says. The film later takes us below the surface to the belly of the glacier and a section that is melting. “Like the inside of our body, you see the inside of a glacier body that is slowly collapsing,” they say.
In this artistic narrative, Breiding blends an ancient ice archive with their childhood home forever changed. They have fond memories of growing up in a small Swiss village, traveling with family for “play and adventure” to the nearby Rhône Glacier. “We would actually slide down this ice river,” says Breiding, whose personal memories are part of the film.
In addition to a large-scale photographic installation is a series of nine smaller macroscopic images, thin slivers of ice photographed through a petrographic lens. “They start to look almost like stained glass windows or an abstraction,” Breiding says. The artist hopes that visitors are made to think about “time as something fragile, how love and loss are deeply connected, that we’re a small part of something much larger”.
In 2019, Iceland built the first memorial to a dead glacier: the Okjökull Glacier. Since then, funerals have been held around the world for melting glaciers. Breiding’s film ends in the future, the year 2050, with a speculative glacier funeral, “like the period at the end of a sentence”, they say.
- Ohan Breiding: Belly of a Glacier, until 14 December, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams