On Breathing(2022)

The Adler Museum of Medicine and POOL present, On Breathing, by collaborating artists Nina Barnett (South Africa) and Jeremy Bolen (United States), an exhibition exploring Johannesburg’s relationship to the act of breathing. Mirroring internal airway tunnels with the networks dug under the city in search of gold, the exhibition thinks through the process of breathing in relation to notions of pressure, particulate, filtration and flow. The mechanics and rhythm of inhaling and exhaling, and the transference of one gas molecule for another are considered within the context of Johannesburg’s mine dust and polluting particles; respiratory viruses and pandemics. Within this framework, the exhibition probes: Can the history of the city be understood through what floats invisibly in the air, and settles in the lungs of it’s inhabitants? What does it mean for geological dust, created in a distant era, to affect the internal tunnels of a human system?