curated by Julia Wolf

In her new works, Denise Bertschi (*1983) examines the interrelations of chemical substances, industrialization and globalization. The starting points are the dye chemistry and photographic chemistry of the 19th and early 20th century as well as the biographies of the ETH professors Pompejus Bolley and Robert Gnehm. Parts of Gnehm’s estate were passed on to his nephew Jakob and niece Emma Windler, from whose inheritance the Jakob und Emma Windler-Stiftung emerged. A special focus of the exhibition lies on the dye brazilin obtained from brazilwood. The artist and researcher follows the visual and material traces between Brazil and Switzerland. In her audiovisual, textile, and installation works, she shows how science was embedded in economic and colonial structures from an early stage.

From June 13 to July 11, 2025, a first chapter of the exhibition «Colors of (Colonial) Chemistry» is on view at the Collegium Helveticum. In 2024/2025, Denise Bertschi is a Post-doc Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum, an institution of the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts.

Flyer Denise Bertschi Colors of (Colonial) Chemistry.pdf

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