Air

Burn While humanity’s capacity for invention has enabled us to progressively introduce new technologies and thrive as a species, it is now clear how seriously we are impacting the Earth systems that support us, creating flow-on effects such as global warming. How can we best see, understand and re-engineer the systems which sustain and now also threaten us? American artist Nancy Holt draws our attention to ventilation. In the 1980s and 1990s she created a prescient series of Ventilation Systems , as well as installations exploring oil and electricity. COVID-19 has given us a heightened awareness of the many interconnected systems we depend upon — that the rooms of a hotel, cabins of a cruise ship or adjacent offices are more closely connected than previously thought — and that the air between us might convey invisible threats. As we attempted to halt the spread of the virus, the deeply connected workings of our global supply chains became more apparent, as did our reliance on one another. We most often perceive global power as expressed through military might, or access to oil, but we can all be rendered vulnerable by our reliance on the interlinked functions of our consumer society. Iraqi-British artist Jananne Al-Ani traces these potent structural relationships in her film Black Powder Peninsula 2016. A rising aerial perspective links the functional geometries of sites on the Hoo Peninsula in south-east England. Former arms manufacturing facilities and redundant fortifications are woven together, circle to square, pipe to tank, with oil and gas storage depots, sewage processing plants and power stations. Nancy Holt / Ventilation System 1985–92 (installation view, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden 2022) Jananne Al-Ani / Black Powder Peninsula (still, detail) 2016 33 32 Do we all breathe the same air? Do we all breathe the same air?