“My work highlights the gray area of Swiss neutrality”: Denise Bertschi examines Switzerland’s impartiality and foreign policy

Are these holiday films or geopolitical documents? Denise Bertschi’s exhibition at the Gwangju Biennale begins with that ambiguity. The Zurich-based artist and researcher uses visual archives to raise uncomfortable questions about Switzerland’s presence abroad and its status as a neutral state.

Until mid-November, the Eunam Museum of Art in South Korea is hosting the Swiss pavilion of the biennale. Bertschi’s project focuses on the presence of a Swiss mission between the two Koreas, while widening the lens to Switzerland’s neutrality and foreign policy.

Her film “State Fiction. Neutral Only on the Outside” (2021) is built from Super 8 footage shot by soldiers from the Swiss delegation stationed in the demilitarized zone. The material looks personal and informal, yet its setting gives it a clear geopolitical weight.

The Swiss deployment dates back to 1953, after the fighting on the Korean Peninsula ended. Bertschi, who holds a doctorate in architectural history from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, works with the archive’s evident ambiguity rather than resolving it. Her exhibition asks what Switzerland’s neutrality means in practice, and what its foreign presence reveals about the country’s foreign policy.

“

My work highlights the gray area of Swiss neutrality.