2024 Asian Art Biennial: How to Hold Your Breath

Yoshinori Niwa, Unavoidable Work in Order to Keep Us Alive (New Iteration), 2019/2024, neon tube, 175 × 200 cm.
Courtesy of the artist.
Installation view, 2024 Asian Art Biennial.
Image courtesy of NTMoFA.

On March 27, 2021, Croatian freediver Budimir Šobat breaks the record for the longest voluntary breath hold, at 24 minutes and 37.36 seconds.

In June 1986, amidst a year marked by disasters and dissent—from the bloodless People Power Revolution that ousted the three-decade-long Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, to the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe—the song Take My Breath Away tops the charts.

In the early centuries CE, the compiled Yoga Sutras of Patanjali describe the practice of kumbhaka as the gradual cessation of breathing, the discontinuance of inhalation and exhalation. The retention of breath has long been known as one of the oldest and simplest techniques for accessing altered states of mind.

The title of the 2024 Asian Art Biennial, How to Hold Your Breath, evokes the act of voluntarily pausing a vital function, creating a state of anticipation. A twist on the saying “don’t hold your breath,” a warning not to expect change soon, is inverted here to suggest latent hope.

Taking a deep breath and holding it anchors us in the present moment. As the world unravels into new sublevels of rock bottom, we continue to migrate and navigate through the din and dust, between place and displacement in this late capitalist fallout. This act of calming the breath and setting the mind prepares for transitioning from one reality to another, in a movement of transformation. It is an interval, to listen to the inaudible and retune with the metabolic rhythms of our bodies and the planet. 

Playing with and yet eluding the principle of a guidebook, How to Hold Your Breath can be seen as a call to withdraw from the spheres of visibility and systems perpetuating violence, to make space for opacity from which new forms of agency can emerge. Imagine it as a deep dive before embracing an uncertain and indeterminate future.

The artists in the 2024 Asian Art Biennial propose alternative imaginaries and practices of world-ordering, both political and aesthetic, inspired by knowledge and ways of living grounded in relationality, reciprocity, and response-ability. At the core of this inquiry is the question: what non-oppressive communal and political forms can bring us together?

Through a variety of media, the artworks presented in the Biennial challenge progressive and universal notions of time, revealing instead how histories are tied to people, places, and positions. By tracing the entanglements of colonial violence within ongoing imperial politics and new social systems that govern life, they open spaces for alternative liberatory futures.

Now and always, we inhabit a pluriverse where multiple worlds coexist and continually shift. Several works in the Biennial engage with altered states—whether through meditation, sleep, dreams, or the pharmakon—seen as liminal zones allowing for alternate, simultaneous, multistable perceptions of the multitude of worlds. The metaphysical act of breath-holding emerges as a means to compose and imagine worlds anew, evoking potential for creation amidst collapse.

Cultural and geographical displacement under global capitalism continues to alter identities, meanings, and constitutions of humans and non-humans alike. Plants, animals, minerals, and human beings are displaced, exiled, extracted, transformed, and objectified within taxonomies of capitalist accumulation, conforming to logics of product and service. Yet, other ways of connection and belonging emerge between and beyond these movements of goods and people, just as new species and cultures evolve outside established maps and memory.

How might future stories unfold free from the apocalyptic myths of modernity to include other beings and agencies in a practice of hope? The answer may lie not in grandiose visions but in concrete, situated imaginaries that we can share with others, close or far— whether through engaging with the small details of everyday life or embarking on new hybrid communities. It is here, in these relationships that we create, where we hold our breath together, that we might find the seeds for imagining a future that resists despair and opens toward new directions.