Dryden Goodwin

Breathe: Single channel video

Breathe: Lahore

Breathe: Lahore builds on the public art strategies of Dryden Goodwin’s Breathe, begun in 2012 as a campaign for clean air, in a city often rated as having the worst pollution in the world.  At the heart of the project are thousands of minutely-realized sketches of different individuals, six to date, whose lives have been impacted by air pollution.  This includes Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah CBE, who established the Ella Roberta Foundation after her daughter became the first person for whom air pollution was listed as a cause for death.  For Lahore, Goodwin depicts Abid Omer, founder of Pakistan Air Quality Initiative (PAQI پاکی), which since 2016 has advocated for citizen-led actions against air pollution across the nation.  Blown up as sequences of street posters or on digital billboards as animations, the drawings of these campaigners inhaling and exhaling laboriously and literally “fighting for breath” make clear the need for clean air as a basic human right.  This issue is especially urgent in Pakistani cities, which face significant challenges from air pollution due to rapid urbanization and a high concentration of vehicles, made worse by smoke from crop-burning, brick kilns, and the burning of biomass and solid fuels for cooking and heating. 

 

In addition to the animation on view at Bradlaugh Hall, Breathe: Lahore also can be found as sequences of posters as well as on digital billboards at locations around the city.

In his work, Dryden Goodwin (b. 1971) combines traditional media such as pencil or ink with video and film, often to spellbinding effect. In 2012, Goodwin projected Breathe, an animation of his son’s breathing, opposite the Houses of Parliament next to Westminster Bridge to draw attention to the need for cleaner air in London. The project expanded in Breathe: 2022 with four additional animations of various local campaigners against air pollution scattered across posters and billboards around the city.  Goodwin’s work has been shown internationally, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale (2003), the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg (2009), OCAT Contemporary Art Museum Xian (2018).