Ohan Breiding, Belly of a Glacier (to dress a wound from what shines from it), 2023, Photographic Installation (111 digital C-prints), 144 x 324 inches.
OHAN BREIDING
Artist Statement
I work with drawing, photography, photographic and filmic archives, video, and collaboration to reinterpret historical events, putting the past into a meaningful transformative relation with the present. I employ a trans-feminist lens to the discussion of ecological care by amplifying landscapes as witness. In doing so, my work aims to remember the forgotten, as they relate to the systemic failures and violence of the Anthropocene. Projects include The Rebel Body (2019), which takes the murder of Anna Göldi (1782), the last person to be executed for witchcraft in Europe, as its point of departure (and the place of my upbringing) and is made in collaboration with Shoghig Halajian and with the participation of Marxist-Feminist writer Silvia Federici (author of Caliban and the Witch). Souvenir (2023), also in collaboration with Shoghig Halajian, continues to explore memory as a site of reparative politics, focusing on the personal, material, and political aftermath of oceanic hazards through the memories of my family member, who survived a tsunami while snorkeling and weaves together her re-telling with the longest studied migration of marine species via plastic debris. Belly of a Glacier (ongoing) is an experimental film and photographic project that braids an ancient ice archive with a community-initiated project that insulates the Rhône Glacier from rising temperatures with a queer, speculative glacier funeral.