“Now breathe…” It may seem surprising that we sometimes need to be reminded to breathe, considering that this phrase initiates millions of meditations. The general rule of survival is that we can go three weeks without food, three days without water, but only three minutes without oxygen. With life and death at the centre of attention, the question at Take a Breath, the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s lung-filling exhibition on “why, how and what we breathe,” should be: isn’t every work of art essentially about breathing? After all, “to inspire” is also to breathe.
A freediver would contradict this three-minute breathing rule, and since art is all about challenging expectations, the exhibition begins with a water installation by Italian artist Alex Cecchetti. The oceans produce about half of the oxygen on Earth. Here, videos of scuba diving and freediving in the Philippines are played over indigo-dyed silk hangings. In the words of Irish artist and freediving champion Nina McGowan, who appeared in an accompanying exhibition talk, in the sea there is “no commercialization, no capitalism, no language.” The sea simultaneously surrounds us and eludes us. In Cecchetti’s hangings, hammocks invite us to immerse ourselves in the worlds of this fragile and strangely alien ecology. On a recent visit, no museum visitor seemed inclined to dive in.
Struggling to contain the amorphous, Take a Breath examines its subject through five themes. It is about breath as meditation, as language, in war; about air in a time of environmental catastrophe; and about feminism, race, and ecology—the latter presented as a three-part hodgepodge that tends toward the diffuse. Despite all this, the breadth of the work on display and the eclectic curation that avoids the obvious convey an edgy sensibility and inspiring insights, mostly without choking on its own erudition.
A world as blue as Cecchetti’s follows in the next of Imma’s long corridors, but this time the element is air. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Air Conditioning explores through video and an expansive wall panel what the Jordan-born, Beirut-based artist calls “atmospheric violence.” Abu Hamdan tracked Israeli fighter jets, drones, and other unmanned aerial vehicles in Lebanese airspace over a period of 15 years, collecting his data from United Nations sources. Made in 2022, before the current conflict in Palestine, it underscores the threatening acoustic omnipresence of these incursions for the people below, while the plumes of smoke wreak their own environmental havoc above.
The toxic consequences of war are often lost in the relief of a ceasefire – and as activists know, it is hard to stress the urgency of things we cannot see. It can seem strange to keep talking about the environmentally damaging aspects of war when people are being killed more immediately by bombs and bullets, but large numbers of people are still dying. This is highlighted in Algerian artist Ammar Bouras’ 2°4′355″N 5°3′23″E. The film collects witness accounts and documents the lead-up to and aftermath of the 1962 Béryl incident, a French nuclear test near In Ekker in the Algerian desert in which underground shafts were not properly sealed. Subsequent studies have focused on the French soldiers and officials affected by the radiation, but Bouras highlights the voices of indigenous people whose lands, livelihoods and often lives were lost as a result.
Moving towards activism, Forensic Architecture, a group based at Goldsmiths College, University of London, presents a thoroughly researched analysis of the tear gas used in protests against racially motivated police violence in Portland, Oregon, in 2020. Their video, which shows clouds of tear gas “significantly exceeding accepted safety limits,” draws attention to the sheer scale of the industry that produces highly toxic substances for some organs of state control.
A sequence in Tear Gas Tuesday showing the movements of the gas is almost exactly the same as Irish artist Joy Gerrard’s 2017 Shot Crowd, but featured here is a work by her brother John Gerrard. His 2008 real-time 3D projection Dust Storm (Manter, Kansas) recreates the Black Sunday dust storm over the central plains of the United States on April 14, 1935. It feels like a horror film, as it inexorably lays bare the consequences of misunderstanding the delicate balance between nature and human intervention, and shows how weak we are in the face of what the world can throw at us.
Similar concerns are more gently evident in a smaller gallery that offers a beautiful juxtaposition of the period. JMW Turner’s The Lake, Petworth, Sunrise, from 1827-8, shows one of the dramatic vistas for which the painter is so famous. These grandiose skies were the result not only of the Romantic artist’s genius but also of a series of three massive volcanic eruptions over the course of twenty years, beginning with Tambora in Indonesia in 1815. The subsequent ash cloud generated by the largest eruption in recorded history caused ‘the year without a summer’, during which crops failed and people starved and died. The spectacular sunrises and sunsets continued for more than a decade while pollution lingered in the atmosphere.
According to the exhibition text, which visitors can borrow upon arrival at Imma, “an estimated seven million people die each year from indoor and outdoor air pollution.” In the same room, Yuri Pattison’s Sun(set) Provisioning, a work from 2019, is a hard-hitting technological installation that includes an atomic clock, computer systems, sensors and a screen. Pattison, whose work is also currently on display at the Pumphouse in Dublin Port, designed the system to collect local pollution data and transform it into imaginary sunsets. The more pollution, the more extraordinary the colors.
In all this intensity, the quieter, meditative works of Take a Breath are somewhat lost. Patrick Scott’s gold Meditation Paintings are oddly diminished by being shown alongside Maria Hassabi’s gold mirrored benches, part of two performances that took place in July; without that context, they seem like flotsam from an oligarch’s beach house rather than a reflection on the meaning of breathing in and out. Similarly, Waqas Khan’s large-scale minimalist drawings seem to “transcend spatial planes,” but to achieve this feat they may need more than a corridor backdrop.
The eruption of Tambora is part of a timeline of the exhibition, an aspect that Imma’s curatorial teams excel at these days (last year’s exhibition Self-Determination is a case in point). Well-researched and brilliantly clear, the story reads like a morality tale about short-sighted hostility and greed. It begins with the Industrial Revolution and traces the growth of manufacturing and commerce and their consequences for the environment and people. It also covers war and “advances” in chemical weapons of mass destruction, while tracing the echoes of all this in art and literature. Moving on to further wars, toxic industrial events, and natural disasters, we come to the first UN Earth Day in 1970 and the US Clean Air Act. More than half a century later, the compromises and capitulations drag on.
In 2014, a new thread is introduced into the timeline when “I can’t breathe” becomes the slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement. The slogan is based on the last words of Eric Garner, who was killed and placed in a chokehold by a New York police officer. Respire (Liverpool), a 2023 work by Austrian-born artist Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski, is a three-screen video showing a series of black people breathing into red balloons. The balloons draw attention to the precarious nature of breathing; the installation lends a sense of precious ritual.
This red balloon and its associations with the preciousness of breath recall Piero Manzoni’s 1960 “Artist’s Breath” (not part of this exhibition). The Italian artist, who charged 200 lire – about 3 euros today – for each litre of air in his red balloons, said: “When I blow up a balloon, I breathe my soul into an object that becomes eternal.” Manzoni died at the age of 30, and today collectors own a tattered red shell, the breath of a once vibrant life.
There is so much more that is moving, fascinating and (only occasionally) irritating in this exhibition. Marina Abramovic runs out of words, Ana Mendieta moves stones with her breath and Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe creates abstract symbols exploring plants, animals, air and water, drawn from his Yanomami heritage, living in the Amazon rainforest on the border of Venezuela and Brazil. Khadija Saye, who died in the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, is represented with a series of tantalising, elusive photographs exploring her Gambian heritage.
It takes time and space to tune out the noise of artists and artworks that speak to the urgent and immediate need to breathe in order to survive, and those that act as a cry for help for a poisoned planet, to deal with the quieter works that still aspire to the universal. That alone is a measure of the challenge facing those who care about the future of the planet. To survive, we must face the crisis, but to survive in everyday life, we may also need to muffle its noise.
As I gasp for air at the end, I’m struck by sadness and the sounds of Susan Hiller’s extraordinary 2007 film The Last Silent Movie. Sitting, consumed by a black screen as Hiller tracks down lost and endangered languages around the world. Whispering in the ether, like ghosts through time, some are scratched field recordings, some obviously rescued from old language lessons. Translations communicate onscreen as the pipes of Silbo Gomero echo through forgotten valleys, reminding someone to bring their castanets to the party. I think of the line from Thomas Kinsella’s Nightwalker about the way “a dying language echoes / Through the silence of a century,” and the tremendous but generally unacknowledged privilege of simply being able to breathe.
Take a Breath is in Irish Museum of Modern ArtDublin, until 17 March 2025. Yuri Pattison can be seen at the Pumphouse in Dublin Harbour until 27 October
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(1019x374:1021x376)/gordon-ramsay-family-1-9158ea4d5168470b940a9088a77f0f68.jpg "Gordon Ramsay was not in the delivery room when his four older children were born")
