Black Breath Spectacle explores oppression, power, to August 13
Charles Campbell’s audiovisual exhibition at Surrey Art Gallery responds to Black Lives Matter by “putting the focus on breath rather than death"
Black Breath Spectacle.
Surrey Art Gallery presents Black Breath Spectacle to August 13; admission is free
THE BREATHING OF senior Black artists and local community members forms multidisciplinary Charles Campbell’s intimate Black Breath Spectacle.
The audiovisual exhibition invites audiences to immerse themselves in the sounds of breath and breathing, taken from a performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2021. Twenty Black artists and curators roamed around the gallery playing recorded breaths that echoed within the gallery walls. Campbell, a Jamaican-born multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator now based on Lekwungen territory in Victoria, invited each participant to imagine being present with a loved one from their past.
Reflecting on power, vulnerability, and oppression, the performance turned the act of breathing into a comment on the poor representation of Black people in art institutions and beyond. A former chief curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica, Campbell created Black Breath Spectacle in response to the Black Lives Matter movement by “putting the focus on breath rather than death”.
The 45-minute sound installation forms the core ambient backdrop of the curated exhibit Black Breath Spectacle. The participants’ breaths, which range from shallow to deep, are reflected in a spectrogram depicting audio waves of the recordings, woven together in a digital image. The vividly coloured digital image resembles an abstract triptych.
Campbell, whose work has been exhibited at the Havana Biennial, the Brooklyn Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Alice Yard in Port of Spain, among other places, will be developing an archive of Black breath recordings in the form of audio and sculptural installations called the Black Breath Archive in the coming year. The solo exhibition will be displayed at the Gallery in the spring of 2023.
