OHAN BREIDING: Promiscuous Ghost

A letter to the future: This is the first glacier to lose its status as a glacier in this region. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.[1]

OCHI is pleased to present Promiscuous Ghost, an exhibition of new and recent work by artist Ohan Breiding. This is Breiding’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Promiscuous Ghost will be on view at OCHI, located at 3301 W Washington Boulevard in Los Angeles, California from November 16 through December 21, 2024.

Ohan Breiding works in photography, video, drawing, and collaboration to represent ritualized practices of collective grief that perform the intimate entanglement of human and environmental well-being. Promiscuous Ghost presents a speculative glacier funeral set in the artist’s accompanying film, Belly of a Glacier. The film is projected from a found weather station, chosen for its technological, symbolic, and site-specific qualities, and the film is shown alongside a song made in collaboration with Dorian Wood, Glacier Elegy. Glacier funerary practices began in 2019, when Iceland constructed the first memorial to mark the death of its Okjökull Glacier. Glacier funerals have since been held around the world to mark the melting of glacial bodies.

Amplifying the current state of climate emergency, Breiding returned to their childhood home in rural Switzerland via their family photo archive and the now ghostscape of the Rhône Glacier where villagers from nearby Obergoms drape thermal blankets over the glacier to insulate it from rising temperatures. Recalling the German etymology of the word “home,” Breiding references the origins “Heimat” and “Gast,” meaning “home” or “haunting,” and “guest” or “ghost,” respectively, while examining their own roots as a visitor to the remains of the glacier. According to glaciologists, the Rhône Glacier is expected to have fully disappeared by 2050. Breiding documented the glacier through photographic and video imagery as well as sound recordings while considering concepts of fever, bodily fragility, and glacier calving—which is paralleled in the film by the birth of a cow.

Promiscuous Ghost reflects on ice as memory and as a site to explore new forms of collective resistance. Ice manifests queer and trans materiality as both glacial and physical bodies bear witness to social and environmental transformation. Reflecting on these themes through the varied scales of monuments and souvenirs that emerge via photography, sculpture, and song, the exhibition considers the conditions and possibility of a future against the current odds. Corresponding language across the bodies of animals and those of glaciers—“glacier tongue,” “glacier snout,” “belly of a glacier,” and “calving”—fosters attendance to what the ice has to say and ultimately invites a closer listening to the landscapes that sustain us.