Ana Brankovic and Peggy Kleiber at Photoforum Pasquart

Photoforum invites you to the opening of their final exhibition cycle of the year, featuring Belonging is a Strange Feeling by Ana Brankovic and De l’Ombre à la Lumière by Peggy Kleiber.

Overview

Both artists explore questions of memory, identity and representation in their own ways. The exhibitions are part of the Swiss Photomonth and are presented in collaboration with Kunsthaus Biel, which is also opening two new exhibitions.

Belonging is a Strange Feeling by Ana Brankovic

What does it mean to belong? How do memory, pop culture, and diaspora shape our identity? In Belonging is a Strange Feeling, multimedia artist Ana Brankovic explores these questions through photography, video, sound, and installation. Drawing from her own experience and the ex-Yugoslav diaspora, she reflects on the construction of identity, collective memory, and the aesthetics of pop culture.

Spread across three thematically distinct spaces, the exhibition combines personal and collective narratives, oscillating between nostalgia and futuristic reflection. Brankovic’s immersive, interdisciplinary approach invites audiences to reconsider dominant narratives around belonging, hybridity, and migration. Through autofictional strategies, documentary material, and AI-generated images, she opens up new visual languages between fiction and reality.

Referencing the aesthetics of the 1990s and today’s digital culture, the show speaks to broader audiences beyond the ex-Yugoslav context. It is especially relevant in light of growing debates around post-migrant identities and the renegotiation of cultural narratives.

Belonging is a Strange Feeling is part of Photoforum’s 2025 annual theme Reclaim the Narrative, which explores who shapes our stories and how images influence our understanding of the world.

Ana Brankovic (*1990) is a multimedia artist, cultural producer and creative director based in Basel. Her interdisciplinary practice combines music, video, photography, fashion, performance and installation to explore social and cultural issues. She is the founder of the platform “Wie wär’s mal “mit and has curated an experimental art space in a harbour container in Basel since 2021.

The exhibition is made possible through the support of Abteilung Kultur Basel-Stadt and the Guggenheim foundation. Photoforum Pasquart is supported by the City of Biel, the Canton of Bern, the Ernst Göhner Foundation, and the Foundation for Art, History and Culture.

De l’Ombre à la Lumière by Peggy Kleiber

Peggy Kleiber (1940-2015) photographed from the early 1960s until 1990, a period of almost three decades during which she documented family, social and political subjects. For her, the family was more than a private retreat. With sensitivity and photographic precision, she documented family rituals, celebrations and everyday gestures over decades. She also photographed people, political movements and landscapes in Italy, her second home. Other parts of her archive record travels to Prague, New York and many other places. Her photographs reveal the unseen, the personal within the political  always marked by intimacy, subtlety and an independent approach to the medium. She photographed continuously from the early 1960s until 1990, a period of profound change in both her personal life and across Europe.

Ten years after her death, her remarkable photographic legacy of some 15,000 negatives will be shown for the first time in her home region. The exhibition at Photoforum offers a long-overdue perspective on the work of a woman whose images are both timeless and deeply relevant today. The project is a collaboration with Judith Luks (Clandestin éditions) and gallerist Isabel Balzer (see you next tuesday), who manage the archive. A publication will accompany the exhibition.

The exhibition and its accompanying program are made possible thanks to the support of the Vinetum Foundation, Ursula Wirz Foundation, Ernst Göhner Foundation, Leica Switzerland and Gebäudeversicherung Bern.