The Air We Share

Air is the focus on the interactive exhibition “The Air We Share” by the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. During the coronavirus pandemic, many of us gained a new appreciation and awareness of the air that we all share. In the fight against climate change, air is a key parameter and is even monetised in connection with CO2 compensation. The exhibition takes these developments as an occasion to investigate air as a social space and ask how we can manage it as a life-sustaining public asset.

The exhibition makes the subject tangible by means of “atmospheric experiments”. For example, the artists Karolina Sobecka, Imani Jaqueline Brown, Zuleikha Chaudhari, Sasha Engelmann and Kōki Tanaka team up with researchers and members of Dresden’s civil society to assess the public asset of air. The artists will then visualise the results of their deliberations in installations, films and experimental assemblies. 

The exhibition consists of four parts. It begins with “Breathing Exercises” in the form of a participative installation. “Air Samples” presents information about air. The “Air Library” is an archive, containing various case studies on the social significance of air. For example, a work by Forensic Architecture sheds light on “Death Alley” in Louisiana, an area historically populated by Black residents and afflicted by heavy air pollution by the oil industry. The last part of the exhibition, “Commoning Air”, examines how we can treat air in a more socially and environmentally equitable manner.
 

Curatorial team: Neli Wagner, Nele-Hendrikje Lehmann
Scenographer: Janek Müller
Participating artists: Atmospheric Research Collective, Frank Bloem, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Zlatko Ćosić, Vibha Galhotra, Sonja Hornung & Daniele Tognozzi, Karolina Sobecka, Koki Tanaka and others