On social media over the weekend, Rose also denounced the Kunstmuseum for hosting a talk on artistic freedom connected to her show. She claimed that she had not been invited to the panel, which included one of the exhibition’s curators and the museum’s director.

“This is prejudicial to the global audience to whom my Artwork speaks, as well as elitist and exclusionary – distasteful to say the least; and abjectly draconian given that the discussion will centre around the horrors of the imbalanced war in The Holy Land, and the genocidal slaughter of unarmed civilians in Palestine by the Israeli government,” Rose wrote in a statement posted to Facebook on Saturday, the day before the talk was held.

A Kunstmuseum Bern spokesperson did not respond to request for comment.

Rose has frequently addressed misogyny, racism, South African politics and history, and more in her art, which has been shown widely in the art world, appearing in editions of the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Sharjah Biennial, the Bienal de São Paulo, and more.

Her retrospective, “Shooting Down Babylon,” first appeared in 2022 at Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, which organized it, and then traveled to New York’s Queens Museum in 2023. At both of those venues, the exhibition was praised by critics and staged without controversy. (Both exhibitions took place prior to the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent military actions in Gaza.)

In her posts over the weekend, Rose alleged that the Kunstmuseum Bern had censored the phrase “Stop the Muslim Holocaust” from her 2012 video A Muster of Peacocks: THE SHOAH. The video had appeared in both the Cape Town and Queens iterations of the exhibition.

Initially commissioned for a show that took place in Cairo during the Arab Spring, Rose made the video in response to her stay in the Egyptian city, where she watched footage of the Port Said Stadium massacre of 2012, which killed dozens of people. Egyptians have claimed the lack of security at the stadium was intentional, since fans of the Al Ahly soccer league had shown up at anti-government protests. Rose said she made the work while pregnant with her son, in her Berlin apartment, not far from where the building’s inhabitants were once deported for Auschwitz.

“The museum directors told us that it is illegal to use the word ‘holocaust’ in Switzerland to describe mass genocide of any other group of people outside of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe during WWII,” Rose said in an email to ARTnews, speaking on behalf of herself and her studio representatives. “As South Africans, this challenged our belief in freedom of speech and expression.”

Rose said that she tried to come up with an alternative in which the video’s audio, partially crafted from her son’s sobs, would play in the Kunstmuseum Bern’s galleries. But she said that when she went to the opening, the audio was not installed.

In Switzerland, Rose’s show gained negative press before the show opened because the artist had in 2021 signed an open letter addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That letter, which was signed by thousands of artists, referred to Israel’s actions as an “apartheid” and called the country a “colonizing power.”

Ahead of the show’s opening in February, the Swiss media resurfaced Rose’s signature, spurring Jonathan Kreutner, secretary general of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, to accuse her of having “radical and non-constructive positions.” In response, the museum added a lengthy statement to its online description for the show.

“Tracey Rose has Jewish and Muslim roots,” the statement reads. “She condemns the cruel attacks by Hamas on Israel and the severe retaliatory measures by the Israeli government, which also affect the unarmed civilian population in Palestine. She condemns all forms of Islamophobia, racism and anti-Semitism and has clearly spoken out in favor of a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine: ‘I believe in the right of the State of Israel and the State of Palestine to exist.'”

A description for Sunday’s talk reiterated some of the background about the controversy over Rose’s signature of the 2021 letter. The stated aim of the panel was to discuss “the meaning and limits of artistic freedom.” Among the panelists were Zeitz MOCAA director and chief curator Koyo Kouoh and Kunstmuseum Bern director Nina Zimmer, along with political science and African studies experts and Ralph Lewin, president of the Swiss Federation of of Jewish Communities.

Rose accused Swiss politicians and Kouoh of “abusive treatment.” Speaking directly to the panelists, she wrote on Facebook, “You have all failed in your duties as cultural practitioners and are not deserving of your positions, where you receive overly generous salaries while failing to pay Artists labour and adequate loan fees.”

A representative for Zeitz MOCAA did not respond to a request for comment.

The Headlines

GROW OR GO. The Portland Museum of Art in Maine has hired a firm for its $100 million expansion: LEVER Architecture, of (confusingly) Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, the Boston Globe reports. The outfit has done work for the Princeton University Art Museum, and has proposed a design for the PMA that will add 60,000 square feet of space for various uses. Across the Atlantic, in beautiful Switzerland, the Kunstmuseum Bern is embarking on a redevelopment project and has invited 39 architects to submit proposals, Building Design reports. They include big names like the Bjarke Ingels Group and Diller Scofidio & Renfro. Also in the architecture press: Dezeen asked 13 Indian architects to pick their favorite buildings in the country; their answers amount to a thrilling tour of the place.

POLICE BLOTTER. At a hotel in Lakewood, Colorado, police recovered five paintings that went missing from an art-transport van last month in Boulder, and arrested a 31-year-old man, Fox 31 reports. The paintings—by Elaine de Kooning, Jane Freilicher, and others—had been valued at more than $400,000, and were found with other stolen items (guns, electronics), almost 2,000 fentanyl pills, and methamphetamine. According to an arrest report, the suspect had offered to sell the hot art for $6,000 to a person who notified police, per 9 News . That tipster had already made a down payment of $1,000 (in bitcoin, naturally), but said he came forward because he wanted to “do the right thing.” He also apparently said that he regularly wastes $1,000 a day on “dumb sh—.” OK! In other legal news, another 31-year-old man was arrested for allegedly stealing 1,500-year-old relics from a church in Subaico, Arkansas, the New York Times reports.

The Digest

An indicator that seems positive for the art market: Though there are concerns that the global economy is slowing, the rich are still buying Rolls-Royces. The luxury carmaker’s CEO said, “We haven’t seen any downturn in order intake here over the last months. I’m cautiously optimistic about this year.” [Bloomberg]

Artist James Turrell will create one of his deeply satisfying “Skyspaces” for the Kansas City Museum in Missouri. The plan is for the piece—the first in either Missouri or Kansas—to be operational in time for the 2026 World Cup, which will take place in various North America cities, including the Heart of America. [KMBC News]

What a run! After 50 years at the helm of Film Forum, the beloved New York arthouse cinema with storied banana bread, Karen Cooper is stepping down. Sonya Chung, its deputy director, will take on the role, with Cooper becoming an adviser. [Artforum]

The Chicago-based Hindman art auction house has named its chief business development officer, Alyssa Quinlan, to be its CEO. [Crain’s Chicago Business]

Curator Robert Leonard has been tapped to be director of the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia. It’s a homecoming of sorts for Leonard, who led the institution between 2005 and 2013. His most recent post was chief curator of the City Gallery Wellington in New Zealand. [ArtAsiaPacific]

Actor Vicky Krieps, who stars as the 19th-century Austro-Hungarian Empress Elisabeth in the new film Corsage, paid a visit to New York’s Neue Galerie, hunting for a portrait that she was told resembles her. While there, she also took in some Egon Schiele drawings. The empress would have been a fan, she said. [The New Yorker]

The Kicker

THE CITY OF LIGHTS. One of the big stories on the international art scene over the past few years has been the ascendence of Paris as an important capital for contemporary art, with big-league dealers opening up shop and billionaires building bountiful museums. In Bloomberg Businessweek, James Tarmy charted the developments, and spoke to a stalwart local, the venturesome dealer Kamel Mennour. “People used to think of Paris as an old lady—a museum city only, with no blood in its veins,” Mennour said. “Now there’s a lot of energy and people and collectors.” [Bloomberg]

Miriam Cahn, o.t., 14.12.2017, 2017, watercolor on paper.

STEFAN JESKE/©MIRIAM CAHN/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MEYER RIEGGER, BERLIN AND KARLSRUHE

Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday.

Today’s show: “Miriam Cahn: ICH ALS MENSCH” is on view at the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland through Sunday, June 16. The solo exhibition, the title of which translates to “I As Human,” includes works on paper, oil paintings, sculptures, videos, and her sketchbooks, which have never been exhibited publicly before. The survey is one of five dedicated to the artist, who was included in Documenta 14.

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Installation view of "Miriam Cahn: ME AS HUMAN," 2019, at Kunstmuseum Bern.

COURTESY KUNSTMUSEUM BERN

Installation view of "Miriam Cahn: ME AS HUMAN," 2019, at Kunstmuseum Bern.

COURTESY KUNSTMUSEUM BERN

Installation view of "Miriam Cahn: ME AS HUMAN," 2019, at Kunstmuseum Bern.

COURTESY KUNSTMUSEUM BERN

Installation view of "Miriam Cahn: ME AS HUMAN," 2019, at Kunstmuseum Bern.

COURTESY KUNSTMUSEUM BERN

Installation view of "Miriam Cahn: ME AS HUMAN," 2019, at Kunstmuseum Bern.

COURTESY KUNSTMUSEUM BERN

Installation view of "Miriam Cahn: ME AS HUMAN," 2019, at Kunstmuseum Bern.

COURTESY KUNSTMUSEUM BERN

Installation view of "Miriam Cahn: ME AS HUMAN," 2019, at Kunstmuseum Bern.

COURTESY KUNSTMUSEUM BERN

Installation view of "Miriam Cahn: ME AS HUMAN," 2019, at Kunstmuseum Bern.

COURTESY KUNSTMUSEUM BERN

Installation view of "Miriam Cahn: ME AS HUMAN," 2019, at Kunstmuseum Bern.

COURTESY KUNSTMUSEUM BERN

Installation view of "Miriam Cahn: ME AS HUMAN," 2019, at Kunstmuseum Bern.

COURTESY KUNSTMUSEUM BERN

Miriam Cahn, o.t., 14.12.2017, 2017, watercolor on paper.

STEFAN JESKE/©MIRIAM CAHN/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MEYER RIEGGER, BERLIN AND KARLSRUHE

Miriam Cahn, o.t., 18.04.2017, 2017, watercolor on paper.

STEFAN JESKE/©MIRIAM CAHN/PRIVATE COLLECTION

Miriam Cahn, am strand, 14.12.2016, 2016, pastel on paper.

STEFAN JESKE/©MIRIAM CAHN/PRIVATE COLLECTION

Miriam Cahn, liebenmüssen, 30.05.2017, 2017, pastel on paper.

STEFAN JESKE/©MIRIAM CAHN/PRIVATE COLLECTION

Miriam Cahn, meine rechte ist meine linke, 22.08.2017, 2017, oil on wood.

STEFAN JESKE/©MIRIAM CAHN/PRIVATE COLLECTION

Miriam Cahn, meredith grey (gestern im TV gesehen), 15.7.15, 2015, oil on wood.

MARKUS TRETTER/©MIRIAM CAHN/COURTESY THE ARTIST, MEYER RIEGGER, BERLIN AND KARLSRUHE, AND GALERIE JOCELYN WOLFF, PARIS

The exhibition “Elemental Gestures” at the Kunstmuseum Bern charted the development of Terry Fox’s oeuvre over the course of his career in the United States and Europe, bringing together an extensive selection of his videos, sculptures, drawings, and installations, as well as documentation of his dramatic performative interventions. Fox (1943–2008) was born in Seattle and moved to Rome in the early 1960s to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti. He spent time in Amsterdam mid-decade and in Paris shortly thereafter. His decision to abandon a painting practice and begin producing action-oriented works can be viewed in light of the protests he witnessed in Paris at the end of the decade and his desire to engage more directly with his audience.

In the late 1960s and ’70s, Fox lived in San Francisco, where his peers included Chris Burden and Vito Acconci. A number of early pieces on view bore similarities to those artists’ better-known work from the same time. Tonguings is a twenty-one-minute black-and-white video from 1970 in which Fox places his mouth close to the camera, sticking his tongue out every which way—the result by turns comical, repulsive, and erotic. In 1970 he also performed Levitation, in which he lay on a bed of earth in an empty gallery holding tubes of the “elemental fluids” urine, milk, blood, and water; when, by his own account, he focused on rising up into the air, he achieved a state of levitation that lasted more than two hours. Visitors later allowed into the gallery saw the impression of his body in the earth, evidence and refutation at once. Although Fox’s use of bodily materials was not unusual within his milieu, it was informed by personal experience: the long periods he spent hospitalized in his teens and twenties, undergoing radiation treatment and other operations related to Hodgkin’s disease.

After the early period of his career, Fox went on to produce several, interweaving bodies of work in various mediums. For many years, he made pieces inspired by the labyrinth paved into the floor of Chartres Cathedral. The exhibition included a particularly delightful example of such a work: The Labyrinth Scored for the Purrs of 11 Different Cats (1977), a seventy-minute sound installation composed so that each of the labyrinth’s concentric rings is represented by a cat’s purr; at the center, all eleven cats are heard purring in chorus. As the deep, reassuring rumble suggests, Fox viewed the labyrinth as a means of self-discovery.

In pieces incorporating text, codes, and runic symbols, Fox disrupted the customary flow of language. The work on paper Footnotes (1992), for instance, stretches out a short unpunctuated text over several dozen lines—its characters appearing like notes on a musical staff—so that the viewer must piece together the narrative, which starts with an intimate description of sensations within a body and then takes off on a meandering tangent.

Fox’s relationship with his audience could sometimes be antagonistic. Ricochet (1987)—his contribution to Documenta 8—was a performance in a garage that included car horns communicating a riddle in Morse code. Unsurprisingly, many audience members were turned off by the noise. Yet Fox could also command a devoted following. In 1990, he enacted Locus Harmonium at Furk’art, an exhibition on the Furka Pass in the Swiss Alps. For more than an hour, a group of thirty or so people trailed behind him as he hiked up the narrow path with a dead fish tied to his back and carried out a ritualistic performance in which he returned the creature to flowing water and, ultimately, buried it in ice. Photographs and videos showing the performance and its dedicated audience conveyed Fox’s role as a cult figure, but, given the strength of the exhibition, one couldn’t help but wish he were more than that.

Christie’s offices at 20 Rockefeller Plaza in New York.

COURTESY CHRISTIE’S

Archaeologists in Florida filed a legal case against the US Department of Transportation regarding a high-speed rail project they say will threaten prehistoric sites of cultural importance: the Old Vero Man site, where human remains dating more than 13,000 years ago have been discovered, and the Gifford Bones site, where prehistoric sloth and mastodon bones were found. [The Art Newspaper]

The director of Documenta 14, Adam Szymczyk, has been in talks with the director of the Kunstmuseum Bern and Germany’s Minister of Culture in an effort to include all of the late Cornelius Gurlitt’s hoarded art collection in the next edition of the show, which will take place in Kassel and Athens in 2017. [The Art Newspaper]

The revitalized Art Cologne fair opens this week. [The Art Newspaper]

Mitchell Syrop’s “The Same Mistake” at Croy Nielsen Gallery in Berlin. [Contemporary Art Daily]

Two paintings (one a Roy Lichtenstein) worth $400,000 were stolen from a foundation established by the late co-creator of The Simpsons, Sam Simon. [ABC News]

Colin Bailey has been named the new director of the Morgan Library. [The New York Times]

Director of the Museum of the City of New York Susan Henshaw Jones is stepping down after twelve years of service. [The New York Times]

Kate Bosworth and Dennis Quaid will be starring in a new TV series, The Art of More, in which they will play CEOs of rival auction houses. [Variety]

Kunstmuseum Bern.

COURTESY WIKIMEDIA

A Munich court has rejected inheritance claims made by a cousin of Cornelius Gurlitt, a reclusive art collector who died at the age of 81 this past May, to Gurlitt’s collection of over 1,000 artworks, The New York Times reports. Before he died, Gurlitt had willed his art trove—comprised of works by Gauguin, Renoir, Monet, and Cézanne, originally purchased by his father for an art museum Hitler was planning—to the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland. According to a statement released on the court’s website, the court has ruled that ownership belongs to the museum, dismissing the cousin’s claims that Gurlitt was unable to make a will at the time of its signing.

The works were rediscovered back in 2012 during a routine tax investigation of Gurlitt’s house. Afterwards, the article states,

The trove was discovered in 2012, when tax officers searched Mr. Gurlitt’s house as part of a routine tax investigation. The German government had kept the discovery a secret, but a German journalist learned of the investigation in late 2013.

The Kunstmuseum Bern signed an agreement accepting the works from the state of Bavaria in November. The museum was preparing to accept the trove when a lawsuit by Uta Werner, a cousin of Mr. Gurlitt, blocked their transfer that same month.

The museum has set up a task force to investigate which of the works might have been looted from Jewish families.  It has already identified several such pieces, including one by Matisse, and the museum plans to return them to the families of the original owners.

Werner has one month to appeal the court’s decision.