Buddha, the Dog from the Mineral Fountains – Philip Berg

Punta Gallery / 28.03.2026 – 19.04.2026

The exhibition “Buddha, the Dog from the Mineral Fountains” is the result of a one-month residency by French artist Philippe Berg in Sofia with POSTA. The starting point for his work is the “Earth and People” museum, with its showcase of crystals and minerals—a medium Philippe has been playing with for years in his artistic practice. During his stay here, Berg spends, willingly or not, some time in and around the bar at the House of Cinema, where the hot water from the mineral fountains evaporates into a misty veil during the winter. It is precisely within this perimeter that Philip gets acquainted with Buddha the dog —always there, seemingly belonging to no one, an integral part of the urban landscape in the area of the baths. The site-specific installation at POSTA is an amalgamation of his impressions of Sofia, intertwining the millennia-old shifts of the earth’s strata with the social fabric of our capital. Born in Digne-les-Bains, Philip Berg developed an early interest in geology, shaped by the landscapes and fossil formations of his region. This relationship to minerals and stratification remains central to his practice today. He studied at the École supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier, where he was initially influenced by contemporary poetry, particularly Christophe Tarkos, Charles Pennequin, and Nathalie Quintane. His early works took the form of performances exploring repetition, absurdity, and the materiality of language. His practice quickly evolved into a cross-disciplinary approach combining installation, sculpture, video, and performance, where mediums intersect and inform one another. This approach aligns with artists such as Roman Signer and Vito Acconci. In 2018, he co-founded the collective CARGO, a performative project combining noise music, recycled objects, and a DIY aesthetic, influenced by Arte Povera and figures such as Panamarenko. After graduating, he worked as an assistant to Max Hooper Schneider, an experience that deepened his interest in mineral systems and processes of transformation. Today, his work brings together ceramics, crystallization, found objects, and fragments of language, forming hybrid structures where geology, memory, and fiction intersect.