Resistance and Respiration

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Darrin Martin, “Take Breath is Breath (still),” 2023

video diptych (courtesy of the gallery)

Artists: Anna Berry, Erik Benjamins & Finnegan Shannon, Atanas Bozdarov, Hannah Bullock, Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose, Andrew Gannon, Darrin Martin, Dylan Mortimer, Liz Nurenberg, Dominic Quagliozzi, Aislinn Thomas, Alice Wong & Georgia Webber.

How do contemporary disabled artists breathe? How is breathing an athletic act, a dyad of push-pull, a feat of endurance, a political horizon? This exhibition is inspired by the scholarship of Jean-Thomas Tremblay, and his new book Breathing Aesthetics (2022). In Tremblay’s book, he uses the work of contemporary artists such as Bob Flanagan to support his scholarship around the complexities of breathing. I take Tremblay’s work as a jumping-off point to incorporate other contemporary disabled artists who illustrate Tremblay’s “breathing aesthetics” in new form and function. Breathing as it relates to disabled bodies might stereotypically be associated with “spasmic bodies” – sharp inhales, gasps, gurgling, coughs, and laboured muscle contraction, and breathing aided by technological apparatuses. Breathing is also greatly stigmatized through black bodies and police violence, and the literal physical struggle beset by our pandemic era. In the context of this exhibition, I’m interested in exploring how contemporary disabled artists make breathing more dynamic and less so dangerous; how does breathing offer other physical, metaphorical and epistemological opportunities to recast the disabled body with a range of “benign respiratory variations”? The exhibition aims to imagine breathing, and breathlessness, as a productive cause for giddiness, a sensation for whirling, and a tendency for staggering.