We welcome Ella C Bernard to the Nordic guest studio where she will work on her ongoing project Fragiles.
Fragiles is an ongoing series of abstract city portraits that began in Paris (2023) and expanded in Lima (2024). In Stockholm, Bernard will work on the third iteration, combining sculpture and film to explore how architecture and streets carry traces of time, care, and everyday life. Collaborating with local voices, she creates haptic encounters with the city through sound, text, and moving image.
Ella C Bernard is a German artist whose visual practice encompasses sculpture, installation, moving image, and text. She primarily works with found and salvaged objects and materials, which often bear traces of their use and their abandonment from the utilitarian and capitalist circuit. Selected for their aesthetic and material potential, these elements are incorporated into installations or become sculptures while retaining their agency: they are presented to be read as they are, without calling for metaphorical or narrative interpretations from viewers.
She is also co-founder of Unqualified Comments, a feminist, queer, and anti-fascist platform for collective reflection and exchange. Under her stay she will host a public event with Unqualified Comments and Fragiles.
Neighborhood Walk with Ella C. Bernard
27.09, 16:00 – Join her to explore the city through its architectures and hidden stories.
Ella C. Bernard (b. Berlin) graduated from the Städelschule, Frankfurt, in 2022 and has since exhibited widely across Europe, the U.S., and Mexico.
Bernard is also interested in underground cable and piping systems, which reveal something about the invisible forces and artificial structures that keep our urban societies running. These systems serve as a metaphor to investigate what remains hidden in plain sight: covert architectures that shape mass and crowd movement. For similar reasons, since 2016 the artist has also explored themes such as the cult of personality, adoration, and fandom, engaging critically with a wide range of figures including David Guetta, Angelina Jolie, Hitler, and (in the making) the band Rammstein. She also pays close attention to small acts of domestic patchwork and repair—gestures that a careful eye can spot in large and medium-sized cities.
The artist sees in these acts attempts to engage with the city and to reclaim public space through simple, if fragile, gestures. In turn, the city records the memory of its inhabitants’ actions—human beings and materials meeting through a mutual acknowledgment of their respective characteristics and powers. Bernard describes her sculptural practice as a conversation, a dance, sometimes a wrestle with the material, and says that most of her sculptural work does not operate primarily on the visual level, but rather as an attempt to approach a bodily sentiment or sensation—for instance, the struggle of holding a pile of sports balls together with a ratchet strap.
Her videos and installations are informed by this sculptural practice. She describes her video installations as essays on specific or distinct topics—for example, the violence of the gaze in the project Birdwatchers. Her sculptural work informs these more essayistic pieces, and what she learns from her immediate exchanges with materials and objects feeds directly into how she conceives space in her installations.
Biography
After studying Biochemistry and Philosophy in Berlin, Ella C Bernard graduated from the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2022. She has held solo exhibitions at Garage Gallery in Prague (2024), at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2023)—where she was also an artist-in-residence that year through the Berlin Senate Art Residency Program—at Stadium Gallery and Cave3000 in Berlin (2018), at Rue de Pompe in Paris (2018), and at Shore Gallery in Athens (2017).
From 2024 to 2026, she is supported by the DAAD in Berlin and has received several travel grants. In 2024, she took part in group exhibitions in Prague, Berlin, Romainville, and at Bard College in New York, where she is currently completing her MFA in Sculpture. In 2025, she has participated in group exhibitions in Mexico City with the collective N/A/S/L (Mexico), at Scherben in Berlin, at Marcelle Alix Gallery in Paris, and at Glassbox Nord in Paris. In June 2025, she presented the first iteration of Fragiles – Paris in the group exhibition La Flânerie at Au Passage, Paris.
After completing her residency at NKF in Stockholm, Ella C Bernard will begin a residency at Synagogue de Delme Art Center Lindre-Basse in October. Before arriving there, she will present Fragiles—a filmic, sculptural, and serial portrait of places—at NKF Stockholm.
Bernard is the co-founder of the newly forming online platform Unqualifiedcomments.com, envisioned as a space for discussion, exchange, and feminist, queer, and anti-fascist resistance. There, she contributes reflections on how to approach difficult memorial legacies such as the Holocaust (e.g. podcast: Promise No Promises, Episode 95) and works as an organizer and editor.
Ella C Bernard is invited by Natasja Loutchko in the unfolding project CAVE — an art project of intimate dialogues.