Sharing an interest in artistic representations of climate change, artist Ohan Breiding and Lisa E. Bloom, author of Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic (Duke University Press, 2022), will discuss Breiding’s multimedia exhibition, Belly of a Glacier, which functions as a moving eulogy for the soon-to-be-extinct Rhône Glacier.

About the Exhibition:
In 2019, Iceland constructed the first memorial to mark the death of its Okjökull glacier. Since then, funerals have been held around the world to mark the melting of glacier bodies. These rituals of collective grief amplify the current state of climate emergency while expressing the intimate entanglement of human and environmental well-being.

Co-organized with the Williams College Museum of Art, Ohan Breiding’s Belly of a Glacier features an experimental documentary film and a photographic installation that connect this act of mourning to ongoing practices of care that strive to preserve ice — a material that contains both remnants of the past and the conditions of a future world. Breiding captures the efforts of the residents of Obergoms, Switzerland, to drape the nearby Rhône Glacier with thermal blankets to insulate it from rising temperatures. Despite these hope-filled actions of ecological care, scientists predict the Rhône will have fully melted by 2050.

Learn more about the exhibition here.

About the Speakers:
Ohan Breiding works with photography, video installation, and collaboration to employ a trans-feminist lens to the discussion of ecological care. Their projects explore photography’s dependence on resource extraction, the archival capacities of the natural world, and the vitality of more-than-human life forms. They have presented their work at ICA LA, the Armory Center for the Arts, LAmag, LAXART, Human Resources, Oakland Museum of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Haus N Athen, Sharjah Art Foundation, IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art, Kunsthaus Zürich, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Frac des Pays de la Loire, Oceanside Museum of Art (Getty PST), Arts and Letters, MASS MoCA, and MoMA. They are a 2025 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Awardee, a 2024-2025 A.I.R. Fellow, a 2024 Triangle Artist Resident, a 2024 Fire Island Artist Resident (FIAR), a 2021 TBA (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary) Ocean Space Fellow, a 2019 Millay Arts (per their website) Resident, and a 2018 Shandaken: Storm King Resident. They are the recipient of the NYSCA Award, Hellman Award, Puffin Foundation Artist Grant, SIFF (Swiss International Film Festival) Award for The Rebel Body, a short film made with Shoghig Halajian and the participation of Silvia Federici (author of Caliban and the Witch), Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award, and DAAD Award. Their practice has been written about in Art in America, Artforum, BOMB, e-flux, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and Whitewall. Breiding is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department at Williams College and is represented by Ochi Gallery, Los Angeles.

Lisa E. Bloom examines aspects of feminist and environmentalist art that conjoins issues routinely kept apart in climate change debates such as the fate of Indigenous communities, resurgent nationalisms, and globalizing capitalism, as well as questions of gender, race, and persistent postcolonial relations. She has taught at numerous universities and art schools over the years, and most recently was at the University of California, Berkeley, as a research scholar (2018-2024).

Ohan Breiding: Belly of a Glacier is co-organized with the Williams College Museum of Art.