Art Exhibition Immortalizes Switzerland’s Rhône Glacier, Predicted to Disappear by 2050
Ohan Breiding’s “Belly of a Glacier” combines experimental film and photography to reflect on a moment of loss—and to fight against it
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In 2019, researchers installed a memorial for the first Icelandic glacier to disappear due to climate change. The plaque at the base of what was once the Okjökull glacier read: “In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
In the past six years, glaciers have not stopped melting. Researchers have predicted that more than half of the world’s glaciers could disappear by 2100. Funerals and memorials continue.
The latest effort to reflect on these losses is “Belly of a Glacier,” an experimental film and photography exhibition by Swiss-American artist Ohan Breiding, which will be on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art through mid-December.
The focus of Breiding’s exhibition is Switzerland’s Rhône glacier, which feeds the Rhône river and Lake Geneva. In recent decades, it has melted with alarming speed: It loses roughly 33 feet of ice thickness annually. Scientists predict that the Swiss Alps will lose half of their glacier volume by 2050.
“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,” Lisa Dorin, the deputy director at the Williams College Museum of Art, which presents the exhibition in collaboration with Mass MoCA, tells the Art Newspaper’s Barbara Reina.
In a half-hour film, which the Berkshire Eagle’s Jennifer Huberdeau calls “one part documentary, one part eulogy,” Breiding captures residents of Obergoms, a Swiss village, draping the Rhône glacier with thermal blankets to insulate it from the rising temperatures.
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Breiding intersperses sounds of a glacier losing chunks of ice with close-up footage of a calf emerging from its mother’s birth canal—a play on the word “calving.”
“‘Calving’ is for the mother calf to give birth to a calf, but in glaciologists’ terms, it’s about the death of a glacier, about the breaking off of a big iceberg into a glacial lake, or an ocean,” Breiding tells the Williams Record’s Tahlia Gerger and Amita Khurana.
The film also spotlights researchers at the National Science Foundation’s Ice Core Facility in Colorado. Drilled from glaciers, ice cores preserve key climatic data over time.
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“I became just so deeply fascinated with ice as one of our oldest record keepers of time,” Breiding says to the Berkshire Eagle.
Like the ice cores, “Belly of a Glacier” creates a record of the earth’s changing climate, freezing the Rhône glacier in time and allowing viewers to enjoy its beauty, even as it melts away in real life.
“We’ve never experienced [these changes] as humans. We’ve never experienced a loss of something that’s so ancient within our short lifetimes, and so it’s about what our feelings are doing and the loss that’s deeply inside of us, and what we’re going to do with that loss,” Breiding tells the Williams Record.
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A wall of 111 photographs titled To dress a wound from the light that shines in it features images of the Rhône glacier from various perspectives, including shots of the villagers trying to protect it with blankets. These photos are interspersed with close-up shots of parts of the artist’s body.
“The stunning photographs and video make the loss feel very personal—as it should, given that we are part of the ecosystem being forever transformed by climate change,” says Susan Cross, a curator at the museum, in a statement.
“Belly of a Glacier” is on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams through December 14, 2025.
