Holding breath: a dying poem Holding breath: a dying poem is a year–long exhibition that considers how transmission, change and affection reverberate on us, once objects and bodies are no longer present. Thinking through logistical and maintenance systems as spectral forces, the exhibition rehearses different temporalities by juxtaposing multiple durations, compositions and assemblages of work.
Across seven acts (overture –act I to V– and epilogue), the exhibition’s organising principle aims to reveal the traces that, beyond physicality, movement and connectivity provoke. In doing so, it tests the political configurations that exist within such immaterial space.
The image contained in the title is this of an oxygen curve being exhaled from the mouth, taking the shape of a vertical concavity. As it evaporates into the atmosphere, the body’s warmth dissipates into a wider mass of air. We breathe and the self dilutes into the environment cyclically, just as the world enters in us, making space through circulation. The cyclical patterns of logistic capitalism oscillate between violence and desire, suffocating life and exacerbating extraction, verging towards total mobility. Shaping a space of intersections between sounds, texts, performances and objects, the exhibition’s repertoire looks into those jointures where echoes, presences, vibrations and ties, reveal our structural fragilities and shared fractures.
Act I presents a new commissioned work by Pol Wah Tse –in complicity with digestivo–, alongside works by Maya Deren, Gary Indiana and Estanis Comella, already on view since the opening Overture (22/03 – 24/04/2025). This first act undertakes the contradiction of a beginning: it unfolds as a co–implicated process that begins in the middle. Bringing together Pol Wah Tse’s work in dialogue with digestivo –an initiative focused on correspondence and resonance between practices through process–centered and collaborative dynamics–, Act I functions as an iteration or echo from a previous exhibition, including the processes discarded during a shared time.
Departing from a diagrammatic approach to volume, it proposes a series of marking exercises: sculptural works that test the plasticity of their material limits, playing with the stains, the residues and the imprints of an action that has already taken place. Some of these pieces will remain on view in future acts of Holding breath: A dying poem, while others have been conceived from a contingent logic. They will be consumed during the course of the event, as annotations or counter–movements that allow language to flourish regardless it bearing fruit.
Such volumetric syntax echoes A meditation on violence (1948), where Maya Deren’s camera follows the movements of dancer Chao Li Chi while performing the Wu-Tang ritual, in which the violence / beauty frontier appears blurred. The breathing rhythm and the negative/positive sequence unfold as the body moves toward and away from the camera. Similarly, the selection of texts from I Can Give You Anything but Love activates a sequence, by alternating vivid memories and embodied experiences. Through the use of a kind of language moving between transcendence and immediacy, Gary Indiana blurs the spatiality, time, and genre of his writing.
These elements refer to processes that exceed the exhibition space, and they vibrate to the sound of Estanis Comella’s shield, a live piece performed in March 22nd, 2025, and its subsequent reverberation. Operating as an echo from a previous presence, this sound is a form detached from its epicenter, those expanding while being gradually resignified.
The exhibition’s complete sequence includes:
22.03.2025
Overture
With: Proteínas, Maya Deren, Gary Indiana and Estanis Comella
24.05.2025
Act I
With: Pol Wah Tse (+ digestivo)
31.05.2025
Act II
With: Joven de la Perla (through Mariano Blatt) + Amaia Urra
12.07.2025
Act III
With: Marouane Bahkti, Jonás de Murias, Gloria Grace Dennis, Nobuko Tsuchiya 土屋信子
27.09.2025
Act IV:
With: Sean Being + Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
11.10.2025
Act V:
With: Billy Bultheel
15.11.2025
Epilogue
With: Reece Cox
