There is something liquid-like about watching a flock of birds in flight, like a feathered river across the sky¹. Passenger pigeons dominated the North American skies until they became abruptly extinct on September 1, 1914.

Swedish-born, Copenhagen-based artist Emilia Bergmark celebrates the presence of these legendary birds, and the story of their merciless and untimely demise, with her work EX (Passenger Pigeon), 2025, presented as part of her solo exhibition, Going, Going, Gone., running until March 7, 2026 at von Bartha in Basel. The hand-made ceramic birds grace the gallery’s wall from floor to ceiling. Installed in a configuration reminiscent of the shape-shifting, almost supernatural, amorphous movement of the birds, Bergmark’s passenger pigeons look to confront the human race, seeking eye contact with their iconic carmine-red irises.

Mistakenly considered everlasting, even omnipotent, due to their extraordinarily dense colonies, these birds travelled in murmurations² that would dwarf any localised movement of starlings today. Churning and twisting across the sky, they moved in wall-like columns performing “like smoke, mist – like a body unindued with voluntary power.”³

The power of a murmuration, you can hear it coming, you can feel it, before you can see it. The atmosphere is like an invisible force pushing the particles of air closer together, something unknown is forming. Deep in the distance an organic, moving shadow forms, it rises and falls as it grows and sweeps the horizon. You can feel its potential, and its uniform power.

Indeed, it is said that naturalist John Audubon compared the effect of the passenger pigeon’s migration, “The light of the noonday was obscured as by an eclipse. The pigeons passed in undiminished number, and continued to do so for three days.”⁴ In 1860 over a billion birds were counted, blocking out the sun, and yet due to human intervention, just 54 years later, they ceased to exist. No more “feathered-tempest” or a “biological storm”⁵ of birds, only stillness, only silence.