Kunsthalle Bern presents a new solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Sung Tieu (*1987, Hai Duong, Vietnam). Working across sculpture, installation, drawing, text, video, and sound, Tieu examines the architectures of power embedded within bureaucratic, archival, and institutional frameworks. In exhibition settings, Tieu’s practice often takes on the appearance of a minimalist intervention in the form of a precise aesthetic that destabilizes the spatial, psychological, and perceptual expectations of the viewer.

For her exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, Tieu develops a new body of work that traces Switzerland’s historical entanglements with colonial economies, centering on the cultivation of caoutchouc (natural rubber) in French Indochina. The project engages with the legacy of Swiss-born physician and bacteriologist Alexandre Émile Jean Yersin, whose presence in Southeast Asia from 1890 onward exemplifies how scientific knowledge and colonial extraction were co-constitutive.

Tieu translates these historical entanglements into a series of spatial and sculptural propositions that reflect on the exploitation, measurement, and regulation of the human body. The works address how the body – configured as a site of production and discipline — was and continues to be subjected to systems of optimization, control, and instrumentalization.

Using formal restraint to weave together fragmented historical traces, Tieu unearths the enduring infrastructures of colonial legacies and demonstrates how the past-all too often suppressed and forgotten, nevertheless shapes our present. It is a confrontation that creates space for renegotiation.