in conversation_KJ Abudu, Omar Berrada, and Adam HajYahia_5x5

Combat Breathing: Aesthetics of Agitation

06JUNE2025 Combat Breathing: Aesthetics of Agitation

A “5x5” conversation between KJ Abudu, Omar Berrada, and Adam HajYahia.

The conversation’s transcript below explores contemporary art as a form of anti-imperial counter-propaganda in response to the failures of neoliberalism and the rise of fascist media ecologies. Through analysis of works by Harun Farocki, Alaa Mansour, Tiffany Sia and Not Channel Zero, a video series by Black Planet Productions, the discussion foregrounds the dual strategies of deconstructing dominant visual regimes and constructing alternative media infrastructures. The event reflects on the ethical and political stakes of image circulation, the affective power of aesthetic form, and the role of the spectator in reconfiguring the function of propaganda at a moment of systemic crisis.

"Combat Breathing: Aesthetics of Agitation" is curated by KJ Abudu and Adam HajYahia with a conversation moderated by Omar Berrada, as part of 99 Canal’s "5x5": an annual series that pairs 5 artists and curators to present live, in-progress work across performance and film over the course of 5 nights.

The full event introduction can be found here.

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Selected quote by 99 Canal’s team

“In my view, I think that these films agitate us into breaking out of a more neutralized, sedated state of consuming images into making us a little bit uncomfortable. What am I witnessing? Should I witness this? Should I not?… I see these films as ones that are clear about what they are, and they're not detached or delusional about being politically driven; they are simply attuned to the social and political conditions that structure their production.”

Adam HajYahia

But aesthetic autonomy is not something that I think either of us are invested in, because when we think about it as a historical concept, we are confronted with its colonial metaphysical residues. There's a whole genealogy of thinkers who are unveiling how the very idea of aesthetic autonomy is premised on a kind of metaphysics of racialized death or racialized necropolitics; how it requires a certain kind of non-being of certain Others to assert its metaphysical coherence. And so if we are to refuse that notion, then what are we left with?

KJ Abudu

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TRANSCRIPT
recorded on 06.06.2025

KJ Abudu (KJA) All right everyone, hello. Thank you for staying. We appreciate it. In Joy’s unexpected absence, we'll now have a quick conversation. Feel free to jump in at any time.

Omar Berrada (OB) I don't know if I should say I have lots of questions for Joy James, but I'll use them another time. I don't know if any of you, or if all of you, saw the document over there that outlines the program for the evening. It was also the announcement for the event, and it's a text that was written by KJ and Adam in preparation for it. And I was told there was a secret document that was much longer of their reflections on this that they didn't agree to send to me, but I think it would be interesting to know how you put these films together. This was not necessarily an obvious sequence of four films. I don't know how you worked on it: if each of you came with a few films, or if you had a much longer list that you boiled down to these four, or if the question came first, or the desire to show something here. So if you could just say a little something about the process would be great.

Adam HajYahia (AHY) So the idea came from a conversation that both of us were having for quite some time, that really centered around what the role of the cultural worker is in this current moment.

How has art been produced, circulated, and presented since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza? But also kind of thinking about this, not as a moment of exception, but as an opening to think about this question historically, and then we juxtaposed this question in relation to another historical debate about contemporary art's autonomy. You know, “art for the sake of art.”

The thesis that Art is a privileged form and site, for it has the capacity to create negation and tension and antagonism because of its open-endedness, its lack of a determinate end, and its capacity to spark conversations and create discussion. So as we have been thinking about art in this regard, we were also by extension, examining aesthetics and culture more broadly, as well as, critical thought and theory, in relation to how the hegemonic institutions that govern the production and circulation of culture and thought, which are the academy or the museum, have been completely prohibiting and censoring any kind of political organization around what's happening in the world in this current moment. There's a very clear effort to censor any reference to the genocide in Gaza, but this exceeds the category of Palestine as geography, and is extended into what Palestine has come to symbolize as a political question.

KJ and I were talking about this a few days ago. We no longer hear about decolonial exhibitions. There was a moment where biennials and museums were invested, fascinated, and fixated on this idea of exhibiting decolonial art, and I think after the seventh of October, this is really no longer the case, or at least we are witnesses to a certain undoing of this trend. This extension beyond the question of Palestine compelled us to draw these links with the banning of Black Studies in US universities, or the banning of Jasbir Puar’s books, for example, the German parliament’s disavowal of decolonial theory in the aftermath of Documenta 15, and so on. And in the middle of all of this, contemporary art autonomy has actually been used and weaponized by reactionary and fascist regimes, as well as funders and donors and museum directors, to completely depoliticize art, and to advocate for the silencing and capitulation of artists and cultural workers. And so, in this instance, propaganda, state propaganda, capitalist propaganda becomes exemplified through apolitical art, abstract art for the sake of abstraction and displacement, open-ended art in this line of thought that has no political statement, no social infrastructure, no political struggle from which it emerges. This is all actually state propaganda, right?

It serves these institutions’ complete neutralization of political movements, and it serves their political ideologies and capital. It is propaganda, but what’s unique about it is that it's propaganda that is just so successful that it has become neutralized as a norm, as something outside of politics. “I don’t want to be political.” So we asked ourselves, what would be a counter-propaganda, an insurgent propaganda? Maybe KJ, you can add to this…

KJA Right, exactly.

If indeed we let go of this liberal idea of aesthetic autonomy for a moment and instead grapple with the somewhat simplified proposition that cultural production does not and cannot exist outside a matrix of ideological determination, or rather stand apart from the social, then we find that the question is not whether the cultural worker makes propaganda or not but rather what kind of propaganda the cultural worker makes. So essentially, if cultural production is always already engaged in some form of propaganda making, then we could perhaps say that, at this historical juncture of liberal depoliticisation and fascist repression, the only way to reclaim, if you will, that valorized attribute of aesthetic autonomy is to actually be direct, to actually make a statement. Anti-imperialist counter-propaganda, then, offers a way to reclaim so-called aesthetic autonomy, a way to actualise its associations with negativity and critique.

We're also thinking about all of this within a certain historical context. Even though we're not trying to exceptionalize this particular moment, you could say there is a kind of serially produced collapse of liberalism, in the sense that the catastrophe or collapse we’re experiencing is not an event, but is part of an enduring structure that is immanent to modernity. And so at this moment where neoliberalism is failing and being exposed as a farce in terms of its impotent juridical and economic apparatuses, we've also seen, at the same time, the ascendancy of the far-right, who have hijacked the vacuum left open by liberalism’s failure through a sophisticated media infrastructure that is geared towards bringing people to their side through the power of affect, through the power of storytelling. And so cultural workers on the left are well-positioned at this moment to actually seize that vacuum in order to unleash anti-imperial counter-propaganda that can mobilise a broad coalition of people. Otherwise said, what can cultural workers do to refuse a closed mediatic space that has been monopolized by liberalism and fascism, which we also see as constitutive historical formations? They're not separate things but two sides of the same coin you could say.

OB Can you say something about where art comes into this picture? Because you could make a speech, right? You chose video works that are all pretty complex. They speak directly in a way, but they also layer that speech, right? There are dissonances between sound and image in certain cases, there's also, what did Tiffany [Sia] call it? “the Twitter feed as method.” And we should also say, Tiffany is here with us in the audience.

KJA Tiffany is here with us. Thank you.

OB So maybe you know, how do you see the form, or aesthetic form, entering this conversation?

KJA I can say two quick things, and then maybe Adam you can add. In the essay, it was very intentional that it was phrased something like, “rather than valorise the reified aestheticism or co-optable, convenient ambiguity of so-called aesthetic autonomy, what if we were to think of contemporary art at this moment as arising organically (so not in a forced way) from liberation struggles?” We were very clear that this was an agitational poetics, and that’s a really tough line to walk because as much as we are thinking about counter-propaganda, about the militant assertion of antagonism, we were thinking at the same time of how this counter-propaganda would not reproduce the non-layered, totalising impulse of liberal fascism.

And so I think all these films are models for how that can be done. I think they do this in broadly two ways. There are works that reappropriate media that is presently used as a weapon, as Harun Farocki’s film makes clear, for example. They foreground the image not as a flat representational schema but as something that is quite multi-dimensional if we factor in its conditions of production, circulation, distribution, reception. This in turn reveals an entire infrastructure that can be dismantled, retooled, and reworked. So, they perform a deconstructive analysis of dominant media. And then on the other hand, I think you also have films that are thinking about how (I don't want to say marginalized or minoritarian) subjects of imperial or racialized power can produce their own media and institutional infrastructures. So yes, there are deconstructive tendencies, but there are also equally a proliferation of reconstructive strategies, and that becomes a kind of dialectic.

I think you see that with Not Channel Zero, a black radical grassroots media collective. They materialise a view from below, highlighting social and political entanglements between a US context and a so-called foreign context. And so that kind of deconstruction/reconstruction capacity of aesthetics is something we were thinking about a lot in relation to the hegemonic media apparatus.

AHY So two things. The first, perhaps, is the fact that art as an object has this dual characteristic, so it's something that's material, but at the same time, it has an immaterial capacity or a metaphysical value. And this is why the value of art as a commodity circulates without necessarily depending on the conditions of its production. So there's like this metaphysical element from which it extracts its value. And this is why art, supposedly, historically has been debated as something that has this capacity to produce social organization around it, create negation, etc.

So if we think about this current moment that we're living in, art has become almost a pure commodity, right? It exists within this foreclosed system to circulate and satisfy capital. It doesn't have any power of negation because this negation is either pacified or severed. It's created and produced for the sake of advancing institutions, advancing personal capital, and so forth. And if this is the moment that we live in, counter-propaganda would be something that, in fact, fights over this negative value that art has that isn't just for the production of capitalist value, where it has something else, as it has this supposed capacity to organize people around it.

We selected these different films, with each of them coming not just from a different political context, but also a different historical moment and historical struggles, to show how art and aesthetic infrastructures were used and depended on by political and social projects. These works were not isolated from other efforts in the advancement of these political projects. They're necessary for the creation of communities in which these images are imagined, seen, consumed, and reproduced, agitating communal crowds and compelling them to think about their content.

So, for example, what's striking for me about Not Channel Zero’s work is that they're a socialist project in the sense that they're incorporating a lot of different world views on why people oppose US interventions abroad, which at the end funnels into an anti-imperialist political project. They’re not necessarily creating a film to tell you that you should subscribe to this school of thought or this theoretical framework in order to oppose something such as US wars and interventionism. Their project is radical because it fights over this kind of social heterogeneous body and multiplicity, rather than proposing a political view that is hermetically enclosed. They don’t approach people in their film with a predetermined idea about who is an anti-imperialist and who isn’t, and therefore, as we have seen, many of the people in the film don’t necessarily agree with one another and come from different subject positions and political backgrounds. I think that NCZ are trying to agitate people who are different from them, who come from different schools of thought, with different approaches, and different class positions. And they deploy art as an infrastructure that has this capacity.

And maybe one last thing to mention, is that if arts and cultures as we're consuming them now, in the hegemonic sense, have become reduced to spectacles of capitalism, where everything is organized around wealth, consumption, following trends, desiring exclusivity, and in the professional artworld sense, well-attended but at the same time exclusive openings that are isolated from their socioeconomic environs, with everything seeming to be great, luxurious, and decadent, aren’t we in turn sedated by this “magic” of capital as much as we are consumed by it?

Openings and gallery shows rarely make us think; we just attend these spaces for a kind of normalized state of crisis that's beautified and contained. So if that is the hegemonic model, we are asking what would be a culture that disrupts this status quo, this hegemon.

What would be a culture that awakens us, that makes us recognize the material and immaterial infrastructures that are fueling this economy? How is art, in fact, connected to something that's happening elsewhere, beyond the aspect of liberal, hollowed-out, and abstract representation? How is the production of culture here actually connected to a war that's happening overseas, and why is speaking about such a war within an art context such a scandalous prohibition? What are the other potentialities of gathering together around art that aren’t a reproduction of this consumptive model? I think these dots are possible to connect through the production of art itself and not elsewhere, which is what these films, we believe, are trying to articulate.

OB “What is the difference between West Berlin and Vietnam?” [quote from Harun Farocki’s film “Their Newspapers”]—right? I mean, there's this thing about anchoring it in a particular space. They're all very specific, these films, actually in terms of where they situate themselves, but that doesn't prevent them, or maybe that's what allows them to reflect on a state of the world more generally. And what you said about the Not Channel Zero is also present, maybe in a more staged or tongue in cheek way in the Farocki film, where they're all sitting with the typewriter and passing the papers, and somebody says “ in order to crush an army, you need to do this” and the other person says “No, you need to do that and it's not like this”... it's this kind of staging of dissensus, in a way. You were going to add something?

Audience (Zoé Samudzi) I was really interested in your relationship to didacticism, which we know is like a double-edged adjective, mostly a critical insult. I'm thinking about this against the idea that art is not supposed to be prescriptive, that all the artist is meant to do is to present a vision to the world that's supposed to be widely interpretable, rather than these really kind of both general and particular positions that were presented in the works this evening. And maybe there's even a kind of small Venn diagram overlap between what you described as agitatory and the didactic. I guess my question is what does it mean to, as a means of trying to stave off a kind of apolitical art that can be labeled with whatever fascistic or neoliberal or whatever kind of politic, to embrace the didactic as a part of this counter propagandistic resistance to fascism, or whatever we're supposed to be doing with aesthetics right now?

KJA Thank you Zoé. If we're conscious of the binary that's being set up by people who use that line of argument, we find that didacticism is often opposed to so-called poeticism, or, again, the autonomy thing, right?

But aesthetic autonomy is not something that I think either of us are invested in, because when we think about it as a historical concept, we are confronted with its colonial metaphysical residues. There's a whole genealogy of thinkers who are unveiling how the very idea of aesthetic autonomy is premised on a kind of metaphysics of racialized death or racialized necropolitics; how it requires a certain kind of non-being of certain Others to assert its metaphysical coherence. And so if we are to refuse that notion, then what are we left with? These films are really brilliant because I think they're modeling something where it's not so much autonomy that's of interest, but I think a kind of social poiesis, this kind of collective making and sensing that occurs under conditions of struggle.

I'm thinking about it on the spot, but they deterritorialize the specificity of art and situate aesthetics within a broader context of social struggle, which is itself subject to an ongoing kind of logic. Struggle never concludes so you can think about it as a kind of ellipsis, and because of this, poiesis arising organically from such conditions will actually index and contain a degree of indeterminacy. Basically, this idea of indeterminacy, open-endedness or poeticism is not something that is the sole intellectual property of Enlightenment thought, it can be located elsewhere where it can easily exist alongside so-called didacticism, or speaking truth to power.

AHY I might be delusional and biased, but these films are a variable proposition. This is not the only mode we think through or the only aesthetic language we are calling the “masses” to commit to. But if we look at what these films are saying or doing, yes, they probably all agree that “empire is bad”, “killing people is bad”, “genocide is bad”, “racial capitalism is bad”... But other than that, which I believe should be baseline, a lot of these films deal with image politics very differently. They deal with questions of aesthetics very differently.

So if we think of Tiffany Sia’s film in relation to Alaa Mansour’s, for example, in how they each deal with the idea of the production and reproduction of images of violence, their circulation, and their decisions are very contradictory in what they decide to make opaque, visible, or not. They're tackling the politics of the image in very different ways and approach notions of violence in disagreement. There's a lot of poetry in Alaa’s film, whereas not so much in this particular work by Tiffany. I don’t think either of these two films has a very clear statement that we can easily arrive at. I do think they open up the image and the politics of the circulation of images of violence to a very complex conversation and debate, in a way that frees how we see images from a didactic approach, forcing us into dealing with these images of war and police violence, and to contend with them.

In my view, I think that these films agitate us into breaking out of a more neutralized, sedated state of consuming images into making us a little bit uncomfortable. What am I witnessing? Should I witness this? Should I not?

Is the use of artificial techniques that render violence invisible, where the violence becomes displaced, and placing text over the image an ethical proposition, or not? Why do I, as a witness, desire to make this violence visible? I think all of these questions are latent in these works, and there isn't a clear demand from us as viewers, other than to make an effort. Having watched these films and now watching them here tonight with everyone, I'm still thinking about them, and although I can see how they can be read in a specific way once viewed side by side, I don't see them as didactic.

I see these films as ones that are clear about what they are, and they're not detached or delusional about being politically driven; they are simply attuned to the social and political conditions that structure their production.

KJA Yeah, they don't exist in some kind of abstract realm of detached mediation, but they are sutured very deeply to specific material conditions and historical contradictions. You can't leave the films being confused as to what the political alignments of the makers might be, but at the same time, they do a clever thing of not totalising meaning. There's a vector, a line of flight in a particular ideological direction but I think they’re still quite open-ended at the same time.

Audience (Zoë Hopkins) Hello. Thank you for gathering us and thanks for this presentation.

I wanted to ask about the title that's animating this event, which comes from a Fanon quote about the surveillance of colonized breath. And I'm thinking about how breath returns us to sort of the most irreducible and infinitesimal register of embodiment, and also how breath is an act of collaboration in many ways, with the environment and with each other.

And, yeah, just thinking about these questions of abstraction in particular, like the West so readily abstracts the concept of breath and poeticizes around it without actually situating it in particular embodied subjects. I guess my question, as we're thinking about the question of breath and how to breathe and how to survive and how to collaborate, what kind of breathing do these films make possible? And also, how might art elaborate a more capacious opportunity for exhale that is not some wishy-washy conception of “we're all just going to breathe and be fine”?

KJA Really hard question. I mean, I can say one thing, and maybe Omar you can too…

I don't have an answer, but I think combat breathing perhaps goes back to the social poiesis idea I was mentioning earlier. This idea of aesthetic autonomy can resonate quite ridiculously under conditions in which you have a boot on your neck, and someone wants you to reproduce a certain mode of aesthetic production that is not tethered to that reality.

And so when you are forced into that position of domination, of abjection, the aesthetics generated by the subjugated body will of course index that forced way of having to breathe.

When we think about breath, we can also think about this kind of line of flight, whether ideological or material, from these films, that you can't leave them confused about where they emanate from, without being touched by the social breath that animates them. Imagistically, I was thinking a lot about Not Channel Zero's video, about the vocal performance at the end … I keep thinking about the black singer’s choreographed expulsions of breath, and what that means, what that does, that kind of performative act.

OB For me, what it's making me think is not so much breath, but a tongue sticking out. I'm thinking of something that Adam wrote. I can't remember the title of the book now…

KJA Aesthetics of the Repressed!

OB So it's a book by Adam HajYahia and Haitham Haddad, and I'm thinking about the passage where you talk about Fatima Bernawi, a Palestinian freedom fighter, who, when arrested by the Israelis and a mug shot needs to be taken, she sticks her tongue out and makes fun of that image of the mug shot. And I don't remember very well, but I remember that you say something that it was a spontaneous gesture, but it's a spontaneous gesture that comes from a repertoire of other gestures, right?

In your joint text, you talk about appropriation and retooling of the propaganda machine. In that book, Adam, you talk about hijacking rather than retooling. I'm interested in that because I think that's an extra element in terms of what we're talking about, the repertoire or the field within which some of these gestures take sustenance from, including in terms of making a work of art … the way you deal with images is not something you invent from scratch also.

AHY So, regarding breath, I’m thinking about this in the context of the US., by remembering Eric Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe”. There’s also the pandemic and questions of health, class, and disability, which leads me to then thinking about the question of breath more historically—it's not a universal category. We're not all breathing the same. And I think that's important to understand.

I believe that Fanon is using this phrase “combat breathing”, not as a poetics of “existence as resistance,” but actually more as an embeddedness in struggle where you are living for the struggle. You are committed to struggling. You are embedded in struggle, and the struggle is part of your breathing under conditions of extreme racial violence. So the breathing that these films could make possible depends on us as viewers and what we do and how we engage with the world we live in beyond the confines of the art world. They perhaps offer us something liberating in the sense that we reconnect with forces that condition the lives we lead, and shake us out of this illusion that art is an escapist realm where we can have a moment to breathe, when in fact every aspect of our lives is hypermediated, by aesthetics no less.

But in relation to Fatima Bernawi and the idea of hijacking images, I'll try to connect it to the films that we've seen today, and the history of photography, or the history of the production of images. There's a sentence that's striking in Alaa Mansour’s film, The Mad Man’s Laughter: “We have never owned our images, nor did we ever own our land.” This kind of dialectic between image and land, an image of me which I do not own, that also mirrors the lack of ownership over my land. And I don't think she used the word “own", but maybe she used something else.

These technologies that we're using, these systems that we're navigating, are all steeped in blood, oppression, surveillance, and violence. So, what does it mean for one to use all of these technologies to advance a political project that goes against the very infrastructural conditions that are geared towards the creation of this technology?

So the passage that I wrote about Fatima Bernawi comes from this comprehension of how much Palestinians are surveilled. There are cameras everywhere in Palestine. The regime overexposes everything about our lives across the land and renders us invisible at once. The interiority of Palestinian life is exposed to us in every little intimate moment. And Fatima Bernawi, when she's taken to an Israeli jail, and she appears in court, and she's then sentenced to life in prison… This is the last image that is going to be captured of her before she disappears, before her image is also taken away from us, right? So she is in that moment, in that condition, under extreme surveillance, jailed, handcuffed, awaiting to enter a prison cell, and she thinks about this very simple gesture where the entire system of surveillance, the image that is supposed to be captured of her, is completely retooled and reused for something very different. The gesture is her sticking her tongue out in anger and ferocity as her mugshot is being taken. The image is then shared online and becomes an image that mobilizes people outside and ignites a revolutionary passion in a lot of women.

It's a certain kind of relationship of inheritance or indebtedness that this image propels, and that happens in an instant, via the image.

The breath that she wants to take in this last moment before she is incarcerated for life, that moment where she is under subjugation, the image that Israel wants to take of her is supposed to be a colonial totem to signify the power and might of the Israeli regime. She turns that moment upside down, hijacking it, to render the image a signal which signifies how fragile the regime is and how penetrable it is and how its foreclosure can be punctured through that very simple gesture. And this is an aesthetic gesture. This is an aesthetic operation. She's thinking about images and their production and their circulation, and she's doing that instantly by having a vernacular understanding of how contemporary images function. So, what does this open up for us? And what does this open up in how we think about societies that are under extreme violence and how they can use the same tools used for their subject subjugation to kind of break out of that state, to break out of this dialectic, this complete rupture of this fixed relation of power?

Audience (Mariam) I’d like to prod you more on thinking about the decisions in relation to the image-making, specifically of Alaa Mansour. If we can demand an offering of politics from art, maybe not didactic, but generative, somehow, what do these choices mean? What does it mean for her to blur the perpetrators and make the portraits very explicit? It's not clear to me, actually, what these politics are. And for me also, if we were to think about it in terms of the image circulation that we're constantly exposed to, how does this differ and what does it offer differently?

AHY Yeah, I don’t know. What does it offer? I think it’s a question, right? You know, she's talking about Iraq, the torture in Abu Ghraib. These images have been extremely exposed, blown out, seen everywhere. Images of extreme violence that American soldiers were subjecting Iraqi captives to are images of empire, and many of these people are still imprisoned or have been disappeared. Many of the Iraqi families of these violated individuals who have been tortured, and whoever is outside of prison that was in these images, have asked to stop circulating them. This was and continues to be a canonical moment that shaped global conversations about the circulation of images of violence in the contemporary moment, not just in the academy. I am also thinking of a more recent conversation that opposed an installation that enlarged and overexposed these images two years ago at the Berlin Biennale 12. The work was by Jean-Jacques Lebel.

So, do we actually need to see the images? I was extremely unsettled by the text that was on the blurred images in Alaa’s film. The image is blurred, but I'm kind of able to imagine what it is with clarity. The image is incomplete, and it requires from me a certain psychic activation of that blurred image. It implicates me in a certain way. I would assume that's maybe one intention that she has. Or, I choose to read this aesthetic decision this way, because this is how it affected me.

KJA The images are blurred but not beyond the point of total illegibility, right? And so they are recirculated back into the world (again, there’s the hijacking) on completely different terms, where the conversation, the violence of the very banal conversation between the soldiers, still remains.

AHY And she says it explicitly, “these images do not belong to us”, they do not own their own images. I think she doesn't want to own their images either. It's perhaps a poetic gesture, but that's something to think about.

OB You can't ignore the text. It's the only thing that you see. And you see it three or four words at a time. So she also determines the rhythm at which you ingest that particular information.

For a while, we hear quite a bit of that, of that exchange. I mean, we read, maybe…

Audience (Tiffany Sia) I'm having a deeply out-of-body experience watching my film get discussed. But I am also intentionally hanging back a bit. I think the reason why I'm hanging back a bit is also maybe to go back to how you introduced these films and the program, in the sense of, what do we do now as art workers, as scholars, as filmmakers, as artists, in a moment of intense rising authoritarianisms? And what is the use of these institutions and this market? And whether they're nonprofit or private, whatever form that it takes to continue cultural production through any kind of funding, how do we make sense of ourselves in that?

I think for me, I've been less interested in putting us, so-called art workers, as the protagonists in that sentence. The protagonist in that sentence is the spectator, is the audience. We're watching these films together, and I also have been hanging back in order to have some level of … You need to deduce these images on your own, I can tell you why I made those choices, but you're also activating them to do something else. And ultimately, what I really want as a practitioner, as someone who's interested in deducing images and thinks deeply about what circulation means … I'm not interested in deducing and interpreting art. I'm interested in deducing and interpreting propaganda. There's obviously playbooks for how these things are constructed, and when I'm talking about leaks and this sort of doublespeak, and if this leader has authorized a leak, those are things that rhyme in different contexts.

So, anyway, for me that's what I want to throw in, the autonomy of the spectator to be able to deduce stuff and no matter what the particular context is, the historical context, we're often talking about similar structures of power and repression vis-á-vis images and vis-á-vis the spectacle, which delivers itself through our phones every fucking day. And also the ways in which these tech companies are creating algorithms that regulate what images we see and how often we see them, etc. Never mind the news media and that itself is also a kind of filtering process.

For me, combat breathing is really about the combat breathing of the spectator. “Do not circulate” — it’s supposed to be asphyxiating, speaking of breath. I want to asphyxiate the viewer because that’s to be truthful about how we experience the timeline.

There's no breath of understanding. I didn't want to create that in this film. I wanted to only compound its confusion. And for me that's the everyday experience of us encountering all types of images, from Gaza for instance; also images that we aren't exposed to, and those critically are the ones that are missing from these overt displays. And how do we account for them together?

So for me, I don't want people to breathe because this isn't that sort of a time. HEI is a Cantonese term like a Qigong, which is, in turn, a sort of method of breathing, but it's a method of breathing that's connected to martial arts and fighting, so maybe that's my sort of counter offer as well.

Audience Yeah, thank you for that. I was going to say something, and now I'm just sitting with what you were saying. But two things that came up, both while you were speaking and before. One, something that I saw circulated, and it might have been on Instagram, and I'm sure many more people saw this … but this line of “we should have kept our images to ourselves” over the past two years and before … “we never should have let the world in, we never should have publicized this, because what has it done, or what has it not done?”

And also the film Ghost Hunting [by Raed Andoni], which if people haven't seen is a documentary about a group of Palestinian men essentially rebuilding conditions of Zionist prisons. And I say conditions because it's not an exact prison, because different experiences of captivity that they endured were replicated in an individualized way, so different cells speaking to different types of captivity. There's a scene in that film where they recreate the room in which ID pictures are taken, and there's a young man who goes in the camera, and they've got an Israeli flag, and he takes a picture, and then he comes back and sees on the monitor how the picture was taken. He says, “Wow, it looks so much like it did there. It's uncanny. Don't let it get out. This will cause a scandal if anyone sees this fake picture.” And it's a very short scene, and then it cuts right after he says that. But since we're talking about possession of the image, or non-possession of the image, I guess I'm just thinking about these things of release and maintenance and when that's necessary, and how we're all negotiating that.

KJA Thank you for that, and thank you as well, Tiffany, for your remarks. To bring things to an end, I’ll just say that the impulse for the event came out of the realization that the liberal fascist regimes that we're forced to inhabit, this so-called reality that structures our existence, that these regimes are stabilized, maintained, and produced, in part, by aesthetics—by media, by images, by sounds—and we're confronted with them every day through an array of digital and analog interfaces. And so if this is the case, how might the artist or the cultural worker be tasked with re-engineering these hijacked aesthetic regimes so that we might end that reality, so that we might end this world? The films we selected refuse the didacticism/poeticism dichotomy because their aesthetic grammars symptomise grappling with presently-existing media in order to engage in the necessary work of deconstruction, of counter-violence, of oppositionality, and at the same time, they are engaged with what exceeds that paradigm in bringing, for lack of a better term, a new world, into existence, an intervention which makes itself known through the indeterminacy, the poiesis, the breath. That's how I'm thinking about it. And this event was really a proposition. We don't have conclusive answers. It's really an open question. It's an offering.

AHY I think this is a good place to end. Thank you everyone for coming.

[Applause]

AHY And thank you for staying when it's really hot…

[Laughter]

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BIOS:

KJ Abudu is a curator, writer, and critic based between New York, London, and Lagos. Informed by anti/post/de-colonial critique, queer theory, African philosophy, and black radical thought, his writings and exhibitions focus on critical art and discursive practices from the Global South responding to the world-historical conditions produced by colonial capitalist modernity. Abudu recently curated Traces of Ecstasy at the fourth edition of the Lagos Biennial and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, 2024. Abudu is currently Associate Curator at Swiss Institute (SI), New York, where he oversees the public programs and has curated exhibitions including Nolan Oswald Dennis: overturns (for which he convened the Black Earth Study Club) (2025); Deborah-Joyce Holman: Close-Up (2025); and Kobby Adi: Cloisters & Instruments (2024). Other exhibitions include Clocking Out: Time Beyond Management, Artists Space and e-flux Screening Room, New York, 2023; and Living with Ghosts, Pace Gallery, London, and the Wallach Art Gallery, New York, 2022. Abudu is the editor of Living with Ghosts: A Reader, Pace Publishing, 2022. His writings have been featured in e-flux, Frieze, Mousse, and numerous other art publications and museum catalogues.

Adam HajYahia is a scholar, writer, and curator living and working in Palestine and New York. He is invested in how practices of image-making, performance, writing, and sound—both within and outside the art market—reflect on, simulate, and initiate sociability and political consciousness. His work looks at the at-once affinitive and conflictual dialectic between psychic desire and capital, and how, through examining this relation, one can understand social organization, anticolonial histories, aesthetic production, labor politics, speculation, and subject formation. He has recently curated Speaking with the dead as part of Bilnaes’ presentation at the Sharjah Biennial 16, and published his book with Haitham Haddad titled And Echo in Search of its Shadow: Aesthetics of the Repressed (2024). His curatorial projects, scholarship, and writing have been presented and featured in various museums, universities, and cultural institutions, such as The Vera List Center at The New School (2024), Bard College (2023), The Mosaic Rooms (2023), The James Gallery at the CUNY Graduate Center (2023), MoMA PS1 (2022), The Berlin Biennale 12 (2022), and Mophradat. He has given talks and lectures at the Harvard Law School, Yale School of Art, Yale Law School, and Wolfson College, University of Oxford. He is currently Associate Curator at the Center for Human Rights & the Arts, Bard College.

Omar Berrada is a writer, translator, and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of Clonal Hum, a book of poems on “invasive species” (2020), and the editor or co-editor of several books, including Album: Cinémathèque de Tanger, a multilingual volume about film in Tangier and Tangier on film (2012), The Africans, a book on racial dynamics in Morocco (2016), and La Septième Porte, Ahmed Bouanani’s posthumous history of Moroccan cinema (2020). His writing has been published in numerous essay collections and exhibition catalogs, as well as in anthologies including The University of California Book of North African Literature (2013) and Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry (2020). Currently living in New York, he teaches at The Cooper Union, where he co-organizes the IDS Lecture Series.

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About 5x5

Over the course of 5 nights, our annual performance series pairs 5 artists and curators to present live, in-progress work across performance and film. Each collaboration is entirely self-directed, there are no fixed formats, outcomes, or expectations.

It’s intentionally low-stakes, a space for open dialogue. After each event, we share selected content to extend public engagement, inviting the work to be revisited and shaped over time.

99 Canal is an artist-run program based in the heart of Lower Manhattan, New York City. Fostering a community-centered environment, we facilitate artists' access to professional studios and public exposure to experimental practices, with a strong emphasis on moving image and performance art.
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