Superconductors by Swiss Artist Vanessa Billy is the first iteration of Horizon of Forms, a new exhibition series initiated by Kunsthalle Bern that expands the institution beyond its walls and into public space through artistic interventions. Conceived for the exterior spaces surrounding Kunsthalle Bern, the work connects the façade of Kunsthalle Bern with the Museumsquartier and the Historical Museum Bern. In doing so, it opens up new points of contact between contemporary art and public life, reaching out to the Bernese.

Superconductors is composed of bundles of high-tech cables for electricity, telecommunications, and optical fibre, rising into column-like forms whose exposed cores of copper, aluminium, and fibre flare outward like bouquets or palm crowns. While the work may initially evoke organic growth, its forms are rooted in industrial materials and highly engineered manufacturing processes.

The installation reflects on the hidden infrastructures that shape contemporary life. Running through walls, beneath roads, and across lakes and oceans, cables carry energy, data, information and signals across the globe, forming the material basis of our networked world. Superconductors brings these usually invisible systems into view, drawing attention to the physical infrastructures we depend on every day, and also to the resources, labor, extractive processes and environmental impact that underpin technologies often experienced as seamless and immaterial at the point of use. In public space the installation becomes a striking reminder that the digital is never weightless or abstract, but always grounded in matter, infrastructure, and extraction.