Dr Sozita Goudouna is a professor, curator and the author of “Beckett’s Breath: Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts” published by Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism released in the US by Oxford University Press. According to William Hutchings’ review, Goudouna’s book is surely the most ever said about the least in the entire history of literary criticism. Her internationally exhibited projects include participation at Performa Biennial in New York, Documenta, Onassis Foundation Festival, NewMuseum, Hunterian MuseumLondon, EMST Contemporary Art Museum, Athens, Benaki Museum among others. For more than twenty years, Dr. Goudouna has devoted her career to engaging broad audiences with interdisciplinary arts and aesthetics. As a staunch advocate for the impact culture and education can have on social engagement and progress, she is committed to projects that demonstrate the crucial links between art and public life. Dr. Goudouna is a guest lecturer at New YorkUniversity (NYU) and adjunct professor at City University New York. She is head of operations at Raymond Pettibon Studio and has taught at New York University as the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow at Performa Biennial in NYC. She served as treasurer in the board of directors of AICA Hellas International Art Critics Association and ITI International Theatre Association, UNESCO.
For #CArtseCon2020, Dr Goudouna will present:
Breathe – Breathe Again… Breathe Better: Investigating the “Politics of Respiration” in the context of the BLM “I Can’t Breathe” Movement
The paper uses as its starting point the “shortness of breath” derived from the experience of political pressure, social injustice and economic austerity, exploring its connection with performance/live art and embodied politics.
Air, the most necessary and common of all living resources, becomes a material signifier for the invisible political bonds that constitute a society. At the same time, in the realm of artistic representation, the concept of Combat Breathing aims to:
- engage with the perceptual and political imaginary of the beholder
- provide the potential of public engagement with breath,
- encourage multiple perspectives on health, art and life, and
- establish original methods of understanding the role that respiration plays in our aesthetic, sensory, emotional and spiritual life.
The paper will analyse major artworks on respiration so as to investigate the “politics of respiration” within contemporary society, as it has been formulated by philosophers, such as Frantz Fanon, visual artists including Wolfgang Tillmans, and impactful social movements such as http://www.nosepeg.com and “I can’t breathe.” The current polarized social condition, especially in the US, is seen through the lens of the complexity of the interface between art and social practice and in relation to the limitless unknowability of the potential of art practice for social change.