Īfter more than fifty years as a pioneering video and installation artist, Nalini Malani maintains a rigor, criticality, and joy that transcends her work’s challenging subject matter. In Cow Heaven Brawl Cloud (2023), the artist Laura Nitsch films.

The orange peels, for instance, refer to a film shown in an enclosed space on the floor below. This reluctance to discretize the works further manifests in the illustration of weather patterns that substitutes for a labelled floor plan, indicating a merging of indistinct “atmospheres.” These unmoored objects-available to touch and vulnerable to pilfering-are presented in ways that resist easy attribution to the contributing artists, attesting to a different logic of exhibition-making. In “Heavy Rotation Infra-habibi-technics,” makeshift infrastructures such as these evoke motion and traffic as well as incidents and happenings that are furtive, off-ledger, or premised on informal networks. Fragments of Campo del Cielo meteorite are dispersed across the walls in various permutations as well: a cosmic extension of the morsels that constitute the ordinary. Assembled by artist duo Valentina Ornaghi and Claudio Prestinari, these tableaux stage a material sensorium of the ubiquitous. Elsewhere in the space, a discarded scratch card lies on the floor beside stacked chairs and potted foliage on wheels.

Unassuming objects-such as grocery cartons, essential supplies, orange peels, shopping carriers, polythene bags, suitcases, a towel, and a lighter-occupy a large hall of Kunsthalle Bern.

House of Clouds by K.I. Thompson