For her exhibition Bleed at Kunsthalle Bern, Sung 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.
Bleed reflects on the afterlives of plantation economies and the infrastructures that sustained them, asking how their logics continue to shape the regulation, measurement, and consumption of bodies today—within a global condition we call Plantationocene.
