[5x5] 2025: COMBAT BREATHING: Aesthetics of Agitation
curated by KJ Abudu & Adam HajYahia
Combat Breathing: Aesthetics of Agitation brings together four moving-image works by Harun Farocki, Alaa Mansour, Tiffany Sia, and Not Channel Zero. The screening was followed by a conversation with curator, writer, and poet Omar Berrada.
Combat Breathing: Aesthetics of Agitation is curated by KJ Abudu and Adam HajYahia.
“There is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual's breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing.”
Frantz Fanon, 1965
We are currently living through an interregnum, a world-historical phase of protracted material and ideological collapse engendered by the inescapable contradictions of (neo)liberal capitalist democracy and its necessary reliance on regimes of fascistic, imperial violence. On the one hand, we, as cultural workers, are confronted by the hegemonic self-image of liberalism, whose institutions valorize artistic production as a site of “aesthetic” autonomy—a propagandistic value which has always relied on the effacement of racialised abjection for its metaphysical renewal and which now finds itself being weaponised by art institutions to deflect from their concrete imbrication with flows of genocidal capital, as demonstrated through the Western-backed war on Gaza. Here, contemporary art is rendered as a front—as pure spectacle—for normalizing and stabilizing liberal capital’s necessary accumulation through colonial terror. Under such conditions, art’s enunciation as a privileged space of autonomy has become a laughably diminishing proposition vis-á-vis its continued presentation and circulation within anti/counter-revolutionary institutions and the market, moving more and more towards embodying capital itself = art as capital’s aesthetic ghost form. On the other hand, we, as cultural workers, have increasingly been confronted by these liberal institutions’ autocratic policing of anti-colonial speech, discourse, and critique, a surreal though unsurprising fascistic turn that mirrors the global advancement of the far-right, who have hijacked the vacuum left by neoliberalism’s (serially reproduced) collapse through a proliferation of audiovisual propagandistic apparatuses affectively calibrated for mass appeal.
“The poem must be on the side of riots looting barricades occupations manifestos communes slogans fire and enemies.”
Joshua Clover, 2015
This double machination—a dialectical propagandistic assault arising from liberal and fascist directions that exposes their constitutive historical articulation—leaves the cultural worker concerned with social transformation and the consciousness of her planetary co-habitants with a potential strategy for action. Combat Breathing: Aesthetics of Agitation proposes such a strategy to involve contemporary art’s methodical appropriation and retooling of the propaganda machine for decisive anti-imperial analysis and collective mobilisation. For at this historical juncture, the reclamation of art’s capacity for negativity and critique will not and cannot be realised through contemporary art’s fetish for convenient, co-optable ambiguity and commodified aestheticism but rather through the fierce unleashing of an agitational ethico-political poetics that arises, organically, from ongoing liberation struggles.
Indeed, we must ask: Is the current state of culture, as propagated and safeguarded by art and academic institutions a culture that makes us think, engage, and/or reflect on the current reality of crisis and social foreclosure, or is it a culture that diverts our attention by consumption, liberalization, and sedation, rendering us neither thinking nor active? Isn’t a culture that frustrates, negates, and redirects our gaze in the age of normalization, globalization, and mass complicity a culture that does in fact make its subject of observation think?
Text written by KJ Abudu and Adam HajYahia
Combat Breathing: Aesthetics of Agitation brings together four moving-image works by Harun Farocki, Alaa Mansour, Tiffany Sia, and Not Channel Zero. The screening was followed by a conversation with curator, writer, and poet Omar Berrada.
5x5 is an annual series we organize for artists and curators working primarily across performance and film, offering a platform for dialogue, the presentation of live and experimental works, and the sharing of in-progress projects directly with the public. For this year’s edition, we are reimagining the format as a series of five public conversations, each featuring two to four participants. These discussions aim to foreground pressing concerns within the participants' current research and practices—ranging from representations of shifting imaginaries of political space in film to the use of improvisation in performance art as a critical and strategic method.
About 99 Canal
99 CANAL is a project run by artists, for artists. As a 501(C)3 non-profit, our studio program and public program seek to amplify artist perspectives and promote equitable access to studio spaces and experimental art practices in the heart of Chinatown, New York City.
With a strong emphasis on film-based media and performance, our public program actively supports experimental practices while offering our local audience unique opportunities for engagement through participation and long-term reflection.
As an artist-run space, we intend to make 99 Canal a hub where impactful forms of art are nurtured, presenting ambitious projects outside of current New York City canons. The public programme is currently funded by our close community, and is access free to the public.
Website https://99canal.net/#. IG https://www.instagram.com/99canal.nyc/