International Airspace, 2019
(Picture: David Rickard)This exhibition is about the politics of air, and especially what it can tell us about the health of our planet and different communities of people who inhabit it. It was planned before the pandemic, and while Covid undoubtedly provides a topical context, it’s not a coronavirus show: the climate emergency and air pollution are the key themes.
It begins smartly with two introductory works that frame the realities and mythologies around the invisible substance that surrounds us. Tacita Dean’s A Bag of Air (1995) is a delightful vignette of a film, in which, over images of a hot air balloon silhouetted against the earth and a scientist’s hand capturing air in a plastic bag, the artist tells us about alchemical notions that suggested you could fill a bag “so intoxicated with the essence of spring that when it is distilled and prepared, it will produce an oil of gold, remedy enough to heal all ailments”.
This distilled material has “a delicacy of substance that is both celestial and terrestrial”. That terrestrial aspect is emphasised in David Rickard’s A Roomful of Air (2022), a site-specific pile of concrete bricks that represents the weight of the air in the exhibition gallery, taking into account humidity and altitude. Air, in other words, is matter – an important concept in what follows.
The political aspects of the show are introduced quietly but then build to a devastating climax. Irene Kopelman has created porcelain sculptures of Alpine ice, reflecting the beauty and fragility of glaciers, which are like archives of our climate. Scientists have warned that up to 92 per cent of glaciers in the Alps could be lost this century. Kopelman’s faint but beautiful studies of phyto-plankton, marine micro-organisms vital to producing oxygen, complement the wonderful cyanotypes of the 19th century botanist Anna Atkins, some of the earliest photographic images of aquatic plant life.
Most of the show from there on is themed around the effects of the toxic substances contaminating what we breathe. Death by Pollution is a stirring and angry-making video by Black and Brown Films about the 9-year-old girl Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, who died of an asthma attack in 2013 – the first person in the UK to have air pollution on her death certificate. The film features interviews with, among others, the brilliant teenage campaigners Choked Up and Ella’s mother Rosamund, who is also depicted in Dryden Goodwin’s series of drawings of six people from Lewisham “fighting to breathe”. They’re presented here as tiny, delicate sketches that move back and forth from a few lines to fully fleshed out figures, as if the drawings themselves breathe in and out (a version of this work, unveiled yesterday, will appear in various sites around the South Circular).
Crucial to Black and Brown Films’s documentary is environmental racism – through systemic structures, air pollution disproportionately affects people of colour. This is explored on an epic scale nearby, in Cloud Studies, Forensic Architecture’s investigation into the weaponisation of air by states and corporations around the globe.
With typically ingenious framing – looking at the history of cloud depictions in art – FA explore numerous case studies, from the effect of Israel’s bombing of occupied Gaza, its use of white phosphorus and crop-killing herbicide, to the pollution caused by more than 200 chemical plants in “Death Alley” in Louisiana, in which, the narrator tells us: “The petrochemical industry has inherited the spatial logics of settler colonialism and slavery” which represent “the latest phase of a continuum of environmental racism spanning 300 years”.
You can watch this investigation online, but try to catch it in its full, immersive and devastating form here.
