Into Your Solar Plexus by Donatella Bernardi

Into Your Solar Plexus is the sum of a multitude of journeys, people and stories collected and edited by Donatella Bernardi. Her uncle and father, respectively a mountaineer and a scientist, were meticulous documenters of their travels around the globe. Their archives constitute the driving force behind the project. In the central part of the book, Bernardi takes over the Kunsthalle Bern for a number of months in 2015, in order to address the notion of political origin, personal mythology, necessity and contingency through art. The family archive is combined with other sources, such as works by the Lebanese artists Saloua Raouda Choucair and Hala Schoukair, mother and daughter, but also historical artworks from the Swiss Confederation Fine Art Collection. Bernardi conceives Into Your Solar Plexus as a permeable organism, a time-based curatorial journey as well as an artist’s book, the perception and interpretation of which were influenced by the natural and political catastrophes that took place during the implementation of the project, such as the earthquake in Nepal or the assault on the Palmyra archaeological site by ISIS militants.

Donatella Bernardi (Geneva, 1976) is a multidisciplinary artist working with installations, publications, films, essays and exhibition curatorship. Her interests cover questions of power, gender, post-colonialism, racial injustice and capitalism. She was part of the Zorro & Bernardo collective (2001-2006) as well as being co-founder and co-director of the award-winning nomadic festival Eternal Tour (2008-2012). She has been a Professor at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm since 2010. A former member of the Swiss Institute (Rome, 2006-2008) and a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, 2008-2009), she is writing a PhD on events and the contemporary art system in the context of globalisation under the supervision of Denise Ferreira da Silva and Stephen Fox (Queen Mary University of London). Winner of the Picker Bursary in 2013, she published her first monograph In Pursuit of Unlimited Hospitality the following year. In 2015, she was a guest curator at the Kunsthalle in Bern, an experience followed by the publication of Into Your Solar Plexus (Humboldt Books, 2016). In January 2017 she will exhibit her project Comunità Olivetti at the Istituto Svizzero in Milan, in partnership with the HEAD, Geneva University of Art and Design.