All That We Have in Common (AN INSTITUTION IN BREATH)

Opening: 27/11/2025, 20:00

The exhibition All That We Have in Common (An Institution That Breathes) introduces the theoretical and political foundations of “combat breathing” as a critical method for acting and reading air as a political medium within the institutional sphere.
Breathing the same air does not mean that we breathe equally. The lack of breath usually follows the lives of the marginalized. Frantz Fanon describes the dreams of the colonized body as “muscular dreams: dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality, of combat breathing.” In these dreams of freedom, the lungs are both instrument and muscle, sometimes atrophied by the toxicity of colonial atmospheres, but always ready to take a sudden breath in decolonial efforts.

In a time when systematic abuse suffocates the disenfranchised, and catastrophic governmental or corporate practices take away the breath of the underprivileged, the challenge is to breathe deeply and fully. We inhale when it is hard and exhale when we are freed from a heavy burden, with the intention of showing the world what happens when people are excluded, deprived of rights, and oppressed.
Inspired by the notion of “combat breathing” and the widespread metaphor of being out of breath associated with oppression, the exhibition All That We Have in Common (An Institution That Breathes) shows how artistic practices intervene, visualize, and dismantle the atmospheres of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism within institutional and everyday life.

Forensic Architecture documents the “toxic clouds” of military and industrial operations that turn the atmosphere into a weapon; in Jumana Manna’s work, air becomes an extension of the territory, colonized and surveilled; Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman explore the history of colonial extraction and the invisible air as trauma that travels through spaces and bodies; the project Gaza Remains the Story by the Palestinian Museum testifies to the constant suffocation of a territory, politically, physically, and symbolically; Durmish Kjazim’s work reveals the stifled air within exhibitions and archives of institutions where Roma bodies and works remain invisible; Zorica Zafirovska, through her intervention addressing the polluted air in Skopje, opens the local horizon on this theme: breathing as an everyday political act in a city living under constant toxic threat.

All these contexts are interconnected and stem from the same structures of violence: capitalist extraction, colonial hierarchies, and systemic exclusion. The project aims to uncover the violence we pretend not to see, in our environment and cultural spaces, and its material, social, and political configurations. Thus, the most important question is how we can learn to detect the whispers of marginalized apneic bodies and, through artistic practices, think about how to enable them to breathe again.

Artists: Forensic Architecture, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, Durmiš Kjazim, Jumana Manna, Zorica Zafirovska, The Palestinian Museum

Curators: Mira Gakjina and Jovanka Popova

The exhibition is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of North Macedonia and Tikves.

Cover illustration installation from the exhibition All That We Have In Common 2023: Zorica Zafirovska, Spaces of Homelessness, 2016, installation, mural, publication and video