In January of this year, Italian philosopher Franco ‘bifo’ Berardi penned an unusual little book titled Breathing: Chaos and Poetry (2019). Tying together fragments of hope and despair, from Occupy Wall Street to Eric Garners gasping last words, Berardi reflects on the contemporary chaos of our ailing respiratory passages.  Warning of further political and environmental blockages to come, ‘breathing’ becomes a potent signifier of an increasingly precarious world. 

A similar sentiment is captured by Breathe, which Interrogates our contemporary anxieties through a series of new works installed in the underground rooms of an ex-artillery shelter on Beara Island. Passing through lung-like tunnels of the artillery shelter the viewer is confronted by coded messages in bright neon that tap into our fragile industrial complexes. Morse-code performances installed in several rooms attempt to ‘work through’ our struggles, to express the frustrations and frantic nature of our everyday lives. Such gestures are repeated throughout the exhibition, promising relief but remaining unresolved, tense, troubled. As Giorgio Agamben has suggested, gestures express what is being "endured and supported" when language fails, that is, "gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language; it is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term" (Agamben, 1996,p.58). Having no instrumental value and no goal, the gesture aims only to support and mediate the character of 'corporeal movement'. Framed by the stale air of the underground tunnels, breathe exhibits a 'corporeal' struggle with the incommunicability of life's pressures, a performance of endurance that can only be captured in gesture, the most elemental gesture of them all, breathing