The exhibition at Kunsthaus Pasquart brings together for the first time a comprehensive overview of Melanie Manchot’s (b. 1966, Germany) work responding to the landscape, community and tourism-led economic infrastructure of the Swiss mountain valley Engelberg.  It marks ten years of producing both photographic and video works relating to this alpine region, forming a sustained enquiry into our complex relationship with mountains as spaces of real and imaginary exploration of our place in the world.

The Diploma festival of the Master in Contemporary Arts Practice of the Bern University of the Arts brings together works by a young generation of ambitious artists keen to experiment. The artistic approach of the graduates is manifested in different media such as performance, video, installation, painting, literature or music and focuses on current issues.

Within Céline Condorelli’s practice (*1974, FR/IT), scenographic elements are used to create installations, sculptures and performances, a process that shifts between art, space and architecture. She thus puts the gallery space and the conventions of making exhibitions on display, revealed to be hidden guides that condition and direct how one sees and moves within exhibition spaces. In this way the artist reveals the function of display, and asks us to reflect on notions of value, visibility, communication or manipulation.

Andrea Heller (*1975, CH) makes works on paper as well as ceramic and glass objects in which a world of fragile landscapes, associative traces and anthropomorphic hybrids unfolds. Reflecting the conditions of our environment, the Biel artist focuses on aspects such as deconstruction, instability and impermanence and produces room-sized installation that can be experienced in a variety of ways.

Asta Gröting’s (b. 1961, DE) sculptures and videos are characterised by the material transformation of the ordinary and familiar. She shows us the things that cannot normally be seen and perhaps those which we don’t want to see, whether it is the human inner ear, the emotional and physical distance between a couple or the trauma embedded in holes made by bullets in the facades of buildings in Berlin. The exhibition brings together new work with sculptures made in the 1990s.

As one of the most important and long-established vehicles of promotion in Switzerland the Kiefer Hablitzel | Göhner art prize is awarded annually to Swiss artists below the age of thirty. Part of the award is the presentation of new works in a large-scale exhibition, in which the artistic ideas and concepts of the prize-winners enter into a dialogue.