Curated by Fabrice Stroun

In her Super 8 sound films of the 1970s and ’80s, American artist Ericka Beckman created sharp-edged concatenations of lo-fi visual effects, dance-like performances, and No Wave audio compositions, always pointing toward the concept of play and its aesthetic and psychological implications. Beckman’s survey at the Kunsthalle Bern this summer will feature some of the best of these seminal works—including We Imitate; We Break Up, 1978; The Broken Rule, 1979; and Out of Hand, 1980—as well as a selection of photos, drawings, and later films such as Switch Center, 2002, and Tension Building, 2012, through which she has continued her ludological investigations. Anchoring this comprehensive display will be Boundary Figures, a major 1989 installation comprising light, sound, and photography, and a new room-size piece conceived specifically for this venue. The catalogue will feature an essay by influential game designer and theorist Eric Zimmerman.

— Ed Halter