Ohan Breiding Mourns Glacial Bodies

We speak about glaciers as if they were the bodies of animals. Snout. Foot. Calve. This corporeal lexicon doesn’t just hint at a vulnerability already evident in the blistering rate of glacial retreat on a warming planet. It also suggests a vitality that is warm-blooded and mammalian: kindred. I imagine that the people who first ascribed these poetically ill-fitting words to masses of ice were a bit in love with them – or at least aware that their ecosystems were among those that glaciers help sustain.

A like-minded tenderness – and metaphorical promiscuity – pervades Ohan Breiding’s ‘Belly of a Glacier’ at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, with Williams College Museum of Art. The Swiss-American artist grew up near the Rhône Glacier, which has retreated by half a kilometre in under two decades. Turning their lens on the melting glacier of their youth, Breiding sees a loved one under threat.

The titular video (Belly of a Glacier, 2024) is on view in a dark room where containers used to ship ice core double as exhibition seating. The piece opens with a blurry photograph of Breiding as a child in the snow. A voiceover relays the artist’s memory of carrying a snowflake to their mother – only to find that it had melted in their hands. Touch, heat, loss, grief: these motifs underpin the associative logics by which Breiding’s curiously affecting video operates. Here, a scene of ‘calving’ depicts not the splintering through which glaciers lose mass, but the birth of a calf. Fluid drips ploddingly from a pale amniotic sac. I wonder whether we will speak of ‘glacial’ paces after all the ice has thawed, and who will be left to speak.

Later in the video, a full-grown cow attends a funeral for the Rhône Glacier. The speculative sequence nods to a lineage of political funerals, from those orchestrated to denounce policy failures, silence and inaction around the HIV/AIDS epidemic, to ones held for environmental entities likewise harmed by neglect, such as Iceland’s Okjökull glacier, which glaciologists declared ‘dead’ due to climate change in 2014.

Elements from Belly of a Glacier, such as a false rock bearing a memorial plaque (Even the stones are alive (a letter to the future), 2024), appear in an adjacent gallery space. Lingering on material that Breiding filmed at the National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility, an ice archive in Colorado, nearby giclée prints (‘Diamond dust’, all 2023) show ice under a petrographic microscope, patterned like military camouflage or pixelated screens. Akin to the rings of a tree, ice can be ‘read’ to see how the climate has changed over time – registering, for example, increased levels of greenhouse gases around the industrial revolution. As humans tell stories about ice, ice tells stories about humans, too.

Footage of the Rhône Glacier wrapped in billowy fabric relocates my heart to my throat. For several springs, villagers in neighbouring Obergoms swaddled the ice with geothermal blankets, hoping to forestall further melting. These draped glaciers reappear in Belly of a Glacier (To dress a wound from what shines from it II) (2023–25), a wall-sized photocollage of over 100 prints. Segmented, repeated and partly abstracted, the forms evoke references ranging from tents sheltering refugees (displaced, perhaps, by the natural disasters and geopolitical tensions that accompany climate emergency) to human skin. These images are interspersed with slivered photos of Breiding’s own scarred body: chest, knee, arm.

Ecological discourses often warn against anthropomorphism for its associations with anthropocentrism. But ‘Belly of a Glacier’ treats intimate equivalences – the metaphors that help us make sense of things – as one of love’s strange methodologies. And love, as we know, flows into politics: from communities tending to their feverish glaciers, to nations enshrining environmental personhood.

Ohan Breiding’s ‘Belly of a Glacier’ is on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams through 14 December. It is curated by Susan Cross and Lisa Dorin.

^{Main image: Ohan Breiding, Belly of a Glacier (To dress a wound from what shines from it II) (detail), 2023–25, photographic installation (111 giclée prints), 4.6 × 9.1 m. Courtesy: Ohan Breiding and Ochi Gallery}