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Ohan Breiding's ‘Belly of a Glacier' at Mass MoCA is a personal lament about loss

A child's voice recounts the episode as a soft, icy blur stamped with a stain of red unfurls on screen, the imprint of a child's snowsuit sledding downhill: The snowflake, beautiful and fleeting, vanishing against body heat before the artist's mother could see it. Over years, Breiding, now a professor at Williams College, would return home to the foot of the glacier and notice it disappearing, bit by bit. With the summer sun warming the increasingly-exposed stone of its mountain basin, larger portions cooked off each year; Breiding watched as cascading meltwater grew from a trickle to voluminous flow. From Ohan Breiding's "Belly of a Glacier," now on view at Mass MoCA. Ohan Breiding Advertisement In 2023, Breiding crafted a memorial service for the glacier, an act of preemptory mourning in vain. Amid footage shot of the glacier itself — boulder-size fragments of ice set loose from its vast, frozen bulk, their jagged edges rounded smooth by water gushing past — Breiding inserts scenes from the funeral, with empty metal folding chairs in tidy rows. On an easel is a photograph of the glacier in its traumatized state — fractured, dripping away to nothing. Behind it is a monumental image of the glacier in the pink of health a century earlier, a colossal field of ice as broad and deep as the valley that holds it. The message is unsettlingly clear: Ancient and vast, the Rhone can now be seen in the context of human-scale time. The funeral feels like a grim joke, gallows humor at geological scale. It's worth noting that the funeral scene is the aftermath — with crumpled tissues, withered flowers, and slim programs left behind on chairs and on the floor. It's clear that the guests have gone, tears have been shed, and the departed released to the void. On a floor strewn with tragicomic faux ice blocks — crudely fashioned of resin and spray-painted a shiny pale blue — a small stone bearing a plaque is inscribed with a pre-epitaph for the Rhone. 'A letter to the future,' it reads, describing the Rhone's dubious distinction as the first in the Swiss Alps to lose its 'glacier' status. 'We know what is happening, and what needs to be done Only you know if we did it.' Advertisement From Ohan Breiding's "Belly of a Glacier," now on view at Mass MoCA. Ohan Breiding And how will the future look upon efforts to prevent glacial bodies all over the world from meeting the Rhone's fate? If the present is any indication, we're in trouble. With a new federal administration actively No one would accuse the piece of being a thriller; slow and meditative, it recasts climate change as less scientific emergency than occasion for grief. Its notes are more emotional than empirical, with its baleful tone translating unsettling data into the more relatable sphere of elegy and mourning. Poignant scenes show the fractured icefields draped in grimy tarps, an action taken by locals each summer to shield the ice from the sun's warming rays; the earnest futility of it only deepens the inevitable tragedy. Ohan Breiding's 'Even the stones are alive (a letter to the future),' 2024. Jon Verney Breiding merges poetic lament with the urgent, tangible work of climate scientists deepening our understanding of what we are now poised to lose. A dizzying scene plunges deep beneath the Rhone's deteriorating skin as the camera follows a drill down into the ice to extract a core sample — time itself, frozen in ice. Breiding tracks it back to the US National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility in Lakewood, Co., where cores extracted from ancient glaciers the world over are stored in stainless steel tubes, stacked on top of each other in a containment room cooled to -36 C (-33 F). The camera follows a bundled-up researcher into the low-lit space, where he extracts the Rhone's shimmering tube from the pile and returns to the lab to probe its secrets. In the lab, a circular carbon blade carves off a wafer-thin slice of the cylinder of ice for close scrutiny. Under a petrographic lens, the ice gives up its stories: particles of dust from volcanoes erupting millennia ago; minute fragments of meteor showers that rained on the planet before civilization as we know it was born. Advertisement Closer to the surface are layers of ice that hold the residue of the first belching breaths of the industrial era in the 19th century, the seeds of its demise. Less than a century later, the glacier stopped accumulating ice and began shedding it — releasing history, decade by decade. Ohan Breiding, "Diamond dust I-IV: 68000-year-old atmosphere trapped in West Antarctic ice," 2023. Ohan Breiding In a gallery near where the film unspools, a handful of photographs reveal what the petrographic lens saw — speckles of particulate in a cascade of color and shape, looking for all the world like abstract paintings from another era. They are not the product of the imagination, but of geology, astronomy, and humanity through the ages, most of it across an expanse of time and experience far too vast for the mind to grasp. Here, the unimaginable meets the unthinkable, as an archive of planetary history unravels before our eyes. Inside the glacier's belly is a sickness, likely beyond cure — and spreading. OHAN BREIDING: BELLY OF A GLACIER Ongoing. Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 1040 Mass Moca Way, North Adams. 413-662-2111, Murray Whyte can be reached at