“Air” is the second exhibition by Brisbane’s QAGOMA in a series – the first, “Water” opened at the beginning of 2020, when Australia was in terrible drought with devastating bushfires that were a daily reminder of the climate crisis. As it turned out, the smoke of those bushfires – and the way they turned the sky red and black – is also the subject of the next exhibition in the series, “Air”.
Air is ubiquitous, often invisible, able to burn and be polluted, and also vital to life and health. The theme is malleable, and also timely due to the Covid-19 pandemic that has dominated our lives since 2020. In the exhibition catalogue, curator Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow writes: “At this moment in history, we are sensitive to air as never before: alert to airborne threats and aware of our shared reliance on it as vital.”
Barlow divides the exhibition into five sections, expanding the meaning of air accordingly: Atmosphere, Shared, Burn, Invisible and Change. Part of the Atmosphere section, Tomás Saraceno’s Drift: A cosmic web of thermodynamic rhythms is an installation of giant silver and transparent balls dotted through the gallery’s main atrium that represents the air itself. Kirrihi Barlow says Saraceno asks us to: “imagine air as it encircles the globe, as a vast invisible highway connecting continents, and as molecules moving within our bodies and bloodstream.”
Saraceno’s companion piece, much smaller, that hangs on the walls beside the installation is We do not all breathe the same air, a framed series of dots on strips of paper. Each dot is the pollution in the air made visible via lighter or darker grey, separated into hours, one strip per day, one hanging per week. A potent reminder that the air we breathe is sometimes poisonous.
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