The surface of Jeppe Hein’s light installation is mirrored so that the viewer sees himself. At the same time, three words flash at a regular rhythm: “Inhale – Hold – Exhale”. After a while, the mirrored museum visitor involuntarily follows the request and begins to breathe evenly and, above all, consciously. The exhibition “Breathing”, which can be seen in the Kunsthalle from today, deals with the facets of a bodily function that is as natural as it is existential.
“Our most immediate, most intense relationship to the world is breathing,” says Brigitte Kölle, head of the contemporary art collection. We breathe 23,000 times a day, but we only notice our breathing when it is impaired. This is how the idea for the exhibition came about during the pandemic, when the air other people breathed suddenly became dangerous. However, the topics of the show go far beyond Corona: It is about creation myths, about soul and spirit as well as language and music, but also about environmental pollution, smoking, the death penalty and state arbitrariness.
Kölle, who has already shown the socially relevant themed exhibitions “Fail Better” (2013), “Wait” (2017) and “Mourn” (2020) in the Kunsthalle, is now forming a curator for the first time with Sandra Pisot, head of the Old Masters Collection -Team. In the exhibition, which extends over two buildings in the house, the painters of bygone eras, including Caspar David Friedrich and Francisco de Goya, correspond with contemporary artists such as Jenny Holzer and Lee Ufan. “The non-representability of breathing has always played a role in art,” explains Pisot.
The approximately 100 works impressively show how imaginatively the 45 artists shown proceed to capture the invisible breath of life. Like Joppe, the Colombian contemporary artist Oscar Munoz also works with mirrors. If the viewer breathes in the mirror glass, a photo of a stranger appears instead of his own image; the person who emerges fleetingly from the haze here was murdered in Colombia’s political violence. As a counterpoint, the painting by the Dutchman Godfried Schalcken, created in the 17th century, is reminiscent of a creation story: the myth of Pygmalion, who falls in love with his own statue and gives it life by breathing his breath into it.
Andreas Greiner addresses the fact that we are closely connected to the plant world when it comes to oxygen. From the seeds of the plane trees that stand in front of the Kunsthalle, the artist grew small seedlings within a year, which now hang as living sculptures in the Hubertus Forest Forum. The video installation “Cloud Studies” by the research agency Forensic Architecture can also be seen here. The agency examines human rights violations and in its studies deals with poison and tear gas as weapons of repressive regimes. The cloud pictures of the romantic artist Johan Christian Dahl represent a contrast to the toxic fog of the present.
As part of the extensive accompanying program for the show, the American Jenny Holzer will be showing her concept work “In Memoriam” on November 19th. At night, the famous last words of the African American George Floyd, who was strangled by a police officer in 2020, are projected onto the gallery of the present: “I can’t breathe”.
