Ohan Breiding
Through photography, video installation, and varying forms of collaboration, I invite viewers to feel how resistance might move our bodies and to pay attention to the places that hold us as we persist. I employ a queer-feminist lens to the discussion of ecological care by amplifying geological and aquatic landscapes of struggle and resistance. My practice is committed to representing subjects that are marked “deviant” or illegible, and to experimenting with forms of world-making that can serve as an alternative to state-sanctioned legitimation, gendered and racialized hierarchies.
Neon Ruins (2022)
More than a century before Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii and its neighboring towns, Alaska’s Mount Okmok’s erupted in 43 B.C.E and triggered global cooling that may have contributed to the famine and unrest that led to the demise of the Roman Republic. Fast forward to the year 2010, Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland erupts and halts air travel throughout Europe. My research project, Time is a Volcano, explores volcanos as agential actors that propose new forms of temporality, desire and embodiment. Instead of reducing the natural landscape as a backdrop for human-centered drama, this project centers disparate yet interrelated volcanic locales and events, in order to speculate on volcanic landscapes as trans, imaginative sites of knowledge production.