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.

Consisting of an experimental documentary film and a photographic installation, Ohan Breiding’s Belly of a Glacier connects this act of mourning to ongoing practices of preservation that strive to protect the 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.

About the Artist:

Ohan Breiding is a Swiss-American artist, raised in a Swiss village and living between Brooklyn, NY and Williamstown, MA. They work with photography, photographic and filmic archives, and video in a collaborative practice that reinterprets historical events, putting the past into a meaningful transformative relation with the present. They employ a trans-feminist lens to the discussion of ecological care to amplify the systemic failures and violence of the Anthropocene. Breiding has presented their work at numerous museums, galleries, and film festivals including ICA LA, Photo LA, the Armory Center for the Arts, LAMAG, LAXART, Human Resources, Oakland Museum of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Haus N Athens, Sharjah Art Foundation, IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art, Kunsthaus Zürich, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo, NY), Frac des Pays de la Loire and Oceanside Museum (as part of the Getty’s PST Art — Pacific Standard Time). Breiding is a 2024 A.I.R. Fellow, a 2024 FIAR resident, a 2024 Triangle Artist Resident, a 2021 TBA (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary) Academy Ocean Space Fellow, a 2019 Millay Colony Resident and a 2018 Shandaken: Storm King resident. They are the recipient of the 1945 World Fellowship Award, the Hellman Award, the SIFF (Swiss International Film Festival) Award for The Rebel Body, a short film made with Shoghig Halajian and the participation of Silvia Federici, the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award, and the DAAD Award. Their practice has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, e-flux, Hyperallergic and Whitewall. Breiding is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department at Williams College and is represented by OCHI Gallery in Los Angeles.

Ohan Breiding: Belly of a Glacier is co-organized by the Williams College Museum of Art and MASS MoCA.