Sophia Al-Maria, Sin Wai Kin

Air de Repos (Breathwork)

15 November 2024 — 04 May 2025

Capc Musée d'art Contemporain Bordeaux, Bordeaux

The group exhibition Air de repos (Breathwork) aspires to generate a renewed awareness of what it means to breathe, not only on an individual level but on a collective one. At a time when the world is experienced in a climate of widespread asphyxia, Air de repos (Breathwork) aims to transform the museum into a temporary breathing machine.

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In recent years, the convergence of political, ecological, and public health phenomena has led to the simple act of breathing to be seen as a privilege. We have been able to observe and analyse the differentiated impact of air pollution according to one’s social background, the ease with which the airways of certain populations can be blocked under the pretext of maintaining order ("I Can't Breathe"), and the potential for air to become a threat due to the viruses and other harmful agents it may contain.

In a museum, air is a subject in its own right. Displaying and conserving works of art requires special control and management because art needs stable, neutral air if it is to survive. This implies that the museum contains its own air, different from that of the outside world. The question asked by Air de repos (Breathwork) is whether it might be possible to breathe differently in the museum.

To imagine the Capc as a rest area, the exhibition was devised around the idea of a "museum without images". The aim is to combat retinal fatigue and the centrality of the eye in museums, and to give images a rest. Mainly comprised of installations, ready-mades and sound works, the guest artists share the idea that sculpture breathes.

With Kobby Adi, Pierre Allain, Alvaro Barrington, Celeste Burlina, Rhea Dillon, Adam Farah-Saad, Valérian Goalec, Eva Gold, Jan S. Hansen, Steffani Jemison, Alexandre Khondji, Sin Wai Kin & Sophia Al Maria, Carolyn Lazard, Brianna Leatherbury, Guillaume Maraud, Park McArthur, Jack O’Brien, Olu Ogunnaike, Ima-Abasi Okon, Russell Perkins, Lea Porsager, Cameron Rowland, Cally Spooner, Jesse Stecklow, Sung Tieu, Jessica Vaughn, Abbas Zahedi.

Curated by Cédric Fauq.
The exhibition Air de repos (Breathwork) is supported by Valorem.

Sophia Al-Maria

Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker living and working in London. Though her work spans many disciplines including drawing, collage, sculpture and film it is united by a preoccupation with the power of storytelling and myth, and in particular with imagining revisionist histories and alternative futures.

With her friend and collaborator Fatima Al Qadiri, Al-Maria coined the term “Gulf Futurism” to describe the growing atomisation of individuals and the shifting ground of urban planning, aesthetics, and media, and their impact on everyday life in the post-oil Persian Gulf. Her cinematic artist’s videos are fuelled by the combination of critical rigour with an affective charge in their explorations of language, imperialism, and counter-histories – a deep investigation and dramatisation of the sociopolitical, economic, and environmental present.

Al-Maria’s debut exhibition in the United States, at the Whitney Museum of Art, 2016, attends to the Gulf’s embrace of consumerism. Black Friday features primarily of shots of empty shopping centres in Doha. An unseen narrator declares the mall as the place “where the glamorous heart of evil is born”, a place of entrapment and confusion complete with faces blurred beyond recognition and bodies collapsed on the floor.

Al-Maria was Whitechapel Gallery’s Writer in Residence 2018, resulting in her exhibition BCE comprising of films, performances and readings, including her first collaboration with the artist Sin Wai Kin. Her most recent collection of essays and writings, Sad Sack, was published by Book Works in 2019.

In 2023, Al-Maria presented the trilogy of videos together for the first time in the a solo exhibition, Not My Bag, at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. The trilogy of works includes Beast Type Song presented at Tate Britain, 2019; Tender Point Ruin commissioned by LUMA Foundation, Arles in 2021 and concluded with Tiger Strike Red, 2022 which formed the artists solo presentation at the Pavillion of Applied Arts, part of The Milk Of Dreams | 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

Sophia Al-Maria recently opened Grey Unpleasant Land, a major collaborative exhibition with Lydia Ourahmane at Spike Island, Bristol.

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