Holding Breaths
While sleeping, drawing, and making music, while walking, sitting, and lying down, working, traveling, and doing nothing, across every climate zone, at every time of day and in every moment: the breath is our quiet companion, source of life, and the first intimate threshold to the world. The permanence of its rhythmic loop remains hidden in the unconscious until a subtle or abrupt shift—whether actively undertaken or passively triggered—brings its presence into awareness. We pause in silence or reverence, linger in a breathing exercise, or freeze breathless in shock, surprise, or dread—each time suspending breath for just a moment. In these instances, the grammatical and physical impossibility of holding multiple breaths at once becomes clear: breath is an indivisible unity, neither multipliable nor divisible by an individual alone. Only in collective gathering more than one breath can be held at the same time.
In the exhibition Holding Breaths, the artistic approaches of Anne Glassner, Lavinia Lanner, and Hyeji Nam encounter one another. The three artists share a conceptual and performative practice that directs its attention to the unnoticed yet precious states of in-between, to fleeting forms and subtle moments. Thus, the concept of breath also gains new performative qualities, shifting between mindfulness and boredom, time-tracking and timelessness, disruption and intention.
Her performances, videos, installations and drawings deal with intensive observations of recurring, everyday acts. The theme of sleep has been a central point of her artistic work for some time now, which she expresses, amongst other ways, through sleep performances, in which she allows others to observe her sleeping in unusual places. In her works she blurs the boundaries between art and life as well as fiction and reality, and she raises questions concerning self-perception and external perception as well as the intersections of the private and the public.
Her artistic practice centers around drawing – more precisely, drawing with 3B pencil on paper. In both small and large formats, the artist pursues the ability of a drawing to slip into a range of roles, including sculptures, furry objects, metallic monuments and brushstrokes. Other series include drawings of found objects, forgotten vestiges of everyday life that are drawn in close-up and resurrected in a new environment and context. Lanner’s practice is currently adopting an increasingly installation-based approach, in which her drawings surround the audience in unconventional performative settings.
is an interdisciplinary artist, musician and researcher whose practice is rooted in rewriting historical and cultural narratives through embodied approaches that queer time, memory, and representation. Working across performance, sound, installation, and digital technologies, she creates affective environments where flesh meets code and histories are re-imagined through disobedient, sensorial storytelling. Interweaving themes of literature, sexuality, social taboos, and cultural politics, Nam mobilizes experimental and queer methodologies to disrupt normative modes of knowledge and presence. Digital tools become both medium and metaphor: from voice-processing and AI-generated sound to choreographed interfaces that translate bodily gestures into sonic and visual languages.