The science is clear, the facts are here, but where is the action? To embed science into society, facts alone do not reach the public. This is where the collaboration between art and science becomes not only relevant, but urgent. We need the capacity to feel the facts, to be moved by them in ways that inspire action, because facts alone don’t move people and policy; emotions do.
This year’s World Biodiversity Forum’s Art Programme does exactly that: it harnesses the emotional power of art and culture to make science more relatable, personal, and ultimately, actionable. To do this, the programme includes an exhibition spread across the conference space and a series of musical performances. Find the detailed programme and art events here.
The exhibition works from the idea that humanity’s most distinctive quality, the capacity to create and to imagine a better future, can be harnessed in the service of preserving what makes our planet irreplaceable: its life and biodiversity.
The WBF exhibition brings together a wide range of perspectives, media, and voices. The Museum for Contemporary Circumpolar Art (MCCA) presents sculptures representing various Indigenous perspectives. Sara Manfio and Pietro Marchese zoom in on the extraordinary biodiversity of fungi living in glaciers: microscopic organisms, largely invisible, yet fundamental to life on Earth. The students of graphic.rodeo present artworks that condense scientific findings on the benefits of biodiversity in sculptural form. Thijs Biersteker takes a more immersive approach with an artwork that physically displaces visitors from the space, enacting the very ecological processes it depicts, a bodily experience of how invasive species disrupt and displace entire ecosystems. The non-profit conservation organisation Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS) Switzerland presents photographs by 18 internationally award-winning nature and wildlife photographers who have turned their lens on the most pressing environmental questions of our time.
The artworks are presented across three locations, each dedicated to a different artistic medium. The exhibition design draws on forms found in nature, the organic flow of plants and leaves, the angular edges of soil and rock, the fluid movement of water and ice, broken into smaller elements that together compose a larger whole. Much like the ecosystems the exhibition explores.
With: Joanna Hoffman & Władysław Polcyn, Thijs Biersteker & Fauna&Flora UK, Museum for Contemporary Circumpolar Art (MCCA), Sara Manfio & Pietro Marchese, Senna-Marie & Dr. Tokoholo Rampai, David de la Haye, BOS Schweiz, graphic.rodeo and Séverine Morfin.
Curated by: Sophie de Krom, WOVEN
Exhibition design by: Tomas Potucek, Thijs Biersteker, WOVEN
Coffee break art performances!
During two coffee breaks, there will be art performances, both times in the coffee area in front of the art location Oasis 3
Tuesday, 16. June 2026: 14:35-14:55 – Chorème – art performance
Wednesday, 17. June 2026: 10:10-10:25 – Senna-Marie – art performance