For the group exhibition Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice, Hammer Museum has gathered artists from around the world to present work that addresses environmental and social issues. The exhibition is part of the PST ART: Art and Science Collide programming taking place throughout Southern California.

From the museum about the exhibition-

The confluence of cataclysmic events that marked the year 2020-among them the global COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic crisis, the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, and the murder of George Floyd, which gave powerful momentum to Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements-created a rupture. For many, it felt like the end of the world that they had known. Under circumstances of physical and psychological lockdown, the very notion of taking a single breath-an act vital to multispecies existence since time immemorial-took on renewed significance. Breathing as an act of resistance and survival in the face of racial inequity and a global health crisis calls attention to the inextricable link between social and environmental injustice. The often imperceptible but ever growing burden of climate-related tragedies-the thawing cryosphere, extreme heat, flooding, deforestation, radioactive aftermaths of wars, and ocean acidification-has played a direct role in the deterioration of economic conditions and the displacement of populations.

Breath(e) assembles artists from around the world who share concerns about threats to their communities and environments. The exhibition foregrounds an ethical stance that critiques the privileging of the human being as the most significant among all entities and instead values interdependence. Some of the works reassess philosophical assumptions regarding what constitutes the “human,” while others question who speaks on behalf of the rights of nature and how we adjudicate the agency of the earth, trees, air, and oceans. The exhibition also highlights artistic practices that have transformed the cultural tropes of the climate crisis into narratives of resilience, transformation, renewal, and coexistence. These narratives are explored through various means: restoring balance and belonging to the land through speculative models for future survival; exploring the regenerative capacities of waste through structural transformations in life cycles; making visible the impact of anthropogenic violence on our bodies over time; the passing down of living knowledge that promotes biodiversity through multiple generations; giving voice to youth and empowering them with food sovereignty; and the radical presence of multispecies survival amid capitalist exploitation. Each of these strategies points to systemic shifts, reminding us of the power of each breath and of how the ethical principles of justice can be advanced amid life as well as on the path to extinction.

Below are a few selections and some additional information from the museum.

About the work above-

Identifying as both a scientist and an artist, Xin Liu uses the language of technological development to explore our desire to preserve and artificially extend biological life. In 2023, inspired by scientific innovations in cryonics and egg freezing, Liu developed Cry:0, a series of mixed-media sculptures that includes The Mothership, a science fiction-like panel equipped with a cooling mechanism that pulls water directly from the air, causing thin layers of frost to gradually develop on the surface of the central bronze mouth, which the artist cast from her own body. With its spectral, biomorphic form and evocative title, The Mothership reflects on technologies designed to manipulate time as well as the central role played by the female body in perpetuating the human species.

About the ikkibawiKrrr multimedia installation and video-

The Korean collective ikkibawiKrr’s expanded approach to art making encompasses performance, workshops, and events. The neologism ikkibawiKrrr consists of the Korean words ikki, meaning “moss”; bawl, meaning “rock”; and krrr, an onomato poetic word that implies a rolling motion. Through its work the group aspires to be “moss-like,” an organism constantly adapting in response to its surroundings. It has focused its recent work on the culture and ecology of the tropical Jeju Island, located off the southern coast of Korea.

A popular tourist destination known for its pristine ecosystem, Jeju Island is home to a community of haenyeo (female divers, or “women of the sea’), who are venerated for their ability to hold their breath for long periods of time while underwater. Upon rising to the surface, the haenyeo make a distinctive whistling sound as they rapidly exhale carbon dioxide and inhale fresh oxygen, a breathing technique called sumbisori, or “breath sound.” A matriarchal community committed to environmentalism, the haenyeo have been sustainably harvesting seafood for centuries. Given their symbiotic relationship with nature, their already arduous work has been greatly impacted by climate change, particularly rising water temperatures, which have harmed algae and changed the migratory patterns of predatory fish. Additionally, Jeju Island is not as clean as it once was, and the haenyeo now risk being trapped by discarded fishing nets and spend their time collecting plastics from the ocean.

In the video that forms part of ikkibawiKrr’s multimedia installation Seaweed Story (2022), a haenyeo choir stands on the cliffs of Hado, a fishing village on Jeju Island, singing a regional variation on “Arrang,” an ancient folk song with strong ties to Korean nationalism. During Japan’s imperialist era (1910-45), the fishing industry exploited the haenyeo and overfished their waters, leading the women to organize local cooperatives and public demonstrations, many of which took place in Hado. Through their performance, the haenyeo reinforce their connection to both the ocean and historical resistance movements. The installation also includes a sandbox containing miniature replicas of the small houses where these women convene, rest, and change in and out of their wetsuits.

Below is Garnett Puett’s sculpture, located inside the enclosed structure pictured above, where bees help create the work.

From the museum-

A sculptor and fourth-generation beekeeper based in Hawaii, Garnett Puett collaborates with bees to create what he terms “apisculptures” (api is the Latin word for “bee”). Combining ancestral knowledge with his passion for art, Puett conceived of this signature method in 1983, when he was a graduate student at Pratt Institute in New York City. As demonstrated by the newly commissioned work on view, Puett emphasizes the creative process over any particular outcome. To initiate Untitled (Paradoxical Garden Downstream) (2024), he conceived a figurative armature for the sculpture, coated it in thick layers of beeswax using a rotating table of his own design, and enclosed it in a habitat for bees. He then introduced a locally sourced queen along with her hive, thousands of worker bees (female honeybees), who made the work their home. Over the course of its brief lifespan, approximately six weeks, the colony will gather nectar and pollen to sustain the queen while elaborating the structure with honeycomb. Working symbiotically, Puett and the bees will eventually arrive at a final apisculpture. Three previously realized works are on view in the same gallery.

From the museum about Roxy Paine and the work above-

Since the 1990s, Roxy Paine has made thousands of scientifically accurate reproductions of mushrooms, underscoring the important role played by fungi in balancing our ecosystems. As agents of decomposition, fungi drive the global carbon cycle-the process by which carbon moves between the soil, living organisms, and the atmosphere. Belonging to a category of artworks that Paine calls “replicants,” his synthetic fungi colonies convincing y mimic the ways organic mushrooms spread in concentrated areas, sprouting directly from the floor or from wall-hung supports. Paine has researched and replicated the three major types of mushrooms: parasitic fungi, which attack living matter, thus regulating the populations of their hosts; saprophytic fungi, which consume and recycle dead matter; and symbiotic or mycorrhizal fungi, which flourish synergistically with the roots of plants and trees, supporting forests as they absorb carbon. Also known as “climate change warriors,” mycorrhizal fungi have the capacity to delay the effects of global warming, but rising temperatures could be putting them at risk of decline.

Chart (2024), a multivariant field, presents lesser-known examples of parasitic, saprophytic, and symbiotic fungi, including Geastrum striatum, or earthstars; the coral-like Clathrus ruber, or cage fungus, a type of stinkhorn that attracts insects by smelling of rotten meat; the scaly, globular Scleroderma citrinum, or pigskin poison puffball; Sarcoscypha coccinea, or scarlet cup, composed of small, open ellipsoids, reminiscent of bodily orifices, that gather in moist moss or on the forest floor; and Lycogola epidendrum, creamsicle-colored pustules that, when naturally occurring, ooze pink slime when pressed. Paine also simulates the neon-bright nets of plasmodium slime mold, a saprophytic organism resembling fungi that consumes mushrooms, bacteria, and other rotting matter. While these species would not be found cohabitating in the wild, they unite in their effort to erode a Turkish rug patterned with abstract representations of flora and fauna. This syncretic rug, a product of merging cultures, stands in for the invisible, carpet-like mycelium, the network of threads that form the rootlike structure of a fungus.

About Mel Chin’s work from the museum-

Commissioned for this exhibition, Interpretation of Vision (or IOV, pronounced “eye of”) consists of thirty-two paintings realized through personal connections with individuals whose lives were altered by phenomenological experiences. Chin believes that the first step in the collective undertaking to fight persistent social and climate injustice is to dismantle division and promote empathy toward others. Opposed to proselytizing, he feels obligated to take the first step.

Like the artist Frida Kahlo, Chin drew inspiration from retablos and ex votos, small-scale devotional paintings, typically on wood or metal, that serve as votive offerings. During the nineteenth century any life-changing event could warrant the making of an ex-voto as an offering of gratitude. Typically produced by anonymous artisans on behalf of a patron, these paintings represent the tragic circumstances, such as accidents and near-fatal Illnesses, that precipitated their commission, showing saints or martyrs intervening to save the life of the afflicted. IOV is a multistage commission that began with a public call for stories from people whose lives were altered by natural, spiritual, or supernatural phenomena. Inspired by the unnamed ex-voto artisans, Chin collaborated with each respondent to honor and elevate their stories. Each dialogue resulted in a diptych, a two-part painting, presented on an artist-designed, seismically sensitive plinth. In each work the rendering of reality is embedded into an aperture on the right, while its corollary, the depiction of the transformational experience, is mounted on the surface. The wall fluidly accommodates any shifts between perception and knowing.

Ron Finley created the large scale garden installation, Grounded for the exhibition, pictured below. Also included in his section of the exhibition are several of the shovels created by his artist friends for Urban Weaponry Project, Weapons of Mass Creation, located in a separate room.

From the museum-

Finley, also known as the Gangsta Gardener, empowers people to grow their own food and advocates for communities to have access to fresh, nutrient-dense, organically grown food. Through the Ron Finley Project, he has cultivated gardens in urban food deserts, places where access to healthy food and fresh produce is limited or nonexistent. In 2009 he began planting vegetables, fruit trees, and other greenery along parkways, the stretches of land between the sidewalk and the street, in South Central Los Angeles. “I wanted butterflies and hummingbirds. I wanted something pretty, like amaryllis and agapanthus, and I wanted it to smell like jasmine, juniper, mint, and orange blossoms,” he recalls. “So that’s what I did.” After receiving a citation from the city for gardening without a permit, he fought back, and the City of Los Angeles changed its ordinance regulating gardening on public land.

With the commissioned work Grounded, Finley brings his urban gardening practice to the Hammer, creating a green, nourishing respite on the museum’s terrace in emulation of his own extraordinary garden. Both sites include vegetables and fruit trees growing alongside artworks and repurposed objects and contain communal spaces intended to rejuvenate audiences while fostering dialogues about food access, empowerment, and freedom. Inside, Finley presents selected works from his ongoing Urban Weaponry Project, Weapons of Mass Creation (2018-), a project that underscores his deep-rooted devotion to art, design, gardening, and grassroots organizing. Seven years ago he noticed that many of his artist friends were working in isolation. In an effort to connect them, he began inviting each one to transform a common, mass-produced gardening shovel into a distinctive work of art. A testament to Finley’s strength in community building, the present installation represents only a small fraction of his expansive collection. “A tool of mass creation,” as he frequently calls it, the shovel becomes a twin symbol of artistic production and food cultivation.

Lan Tuazon also created a large installation outside of the main galleries (pictured below).

From the museum-

Part of a generation of artists invested in criticizing institutionalized systems, Lan Tuazon proposes methods for recirculating organic and human-made materials to sustainably extend the lifespan of our things. In a linear economy, most consumer products begin as natural resources extracted from the landscape only to conclude as waste in a landfill. Commissioned for this exhibition, Over Your Head & Under the Weather (2024) stages a circular economy by demonstrating techniques of material recovery. Single-use plastics have been industrially shredded and pressed into panels, surplus newspapers are densified into newspaper wood, and other organic materials like coconut fibers are reconfigured into papercrete. Tuazon also makes use of innovative industrial products. The entire structure is constructed from multifunctional WaterBricks, interlocking, modular storage containers originally designed to preserve food and water for emergency and disaster relief purposes, and the floor is lined with Biomason’s carbon-reducing/sequestering Biolith tiles, made with recycled aggregates and bacterium-cultivated cement.

Designed to resemble a functionalized minimal sculpture, Over Your Head & Under the Weather wraps around the building to form two primary architectural bays. One side houses an industrial shredder and a plastic-collection station. Visitors are invited to contribute to the work’s circular economy by donating their #2 and #5 plastics, which will later be processed and shredded. The windows on the other side of the structure contain sculptural reliefs from Tuazon’s Assorted Drive series. Drawing on the language of data storage, the Assorted Drives ironically preserve physical evidence of human production and consumption: found materials, plastic beverage rings, bread ties, caps, and confetti made from previously shredded plastics. Part of an ongoing series, the towering sculpture Future Fossil-made from mass-produced containers, cut and nested like Russian dolls-uses the metaphor of geological petrification to allude to the tremendous scale and indeterminate lifespan of consumer and industrial waste.

Tiffany Chung’s stored in a jar: moonsoon, drowning fish, color of water, and the floating world, 2010-11, pictured below, references Vietnam and its vulnerability to flooding and the rising sea level.

Through meticulous archival and mapping practices, Tiffany Chung commemorates the experiences of local communities facing sociopolitical and climate-related trauma, placing those experiences within a global context. Born in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, Chung was forced to relocate following the fall of Saigon in 1975 to one of the government’s New Economic Zones (NEZ) as part of a population redistribution program aimed at restructuring Vietnam’s economy and southern society. Chung moved with her family to the Mekong Delta, the southwestern region of Vietnam where the Mekong River meets the South China Sea. In 1978 she witnessed a historic riverine flood in the area that killed seventy-four, left seventy-nine thousand homeless, and impacted more than four hundred thousand people. Eventually Chung migrated to the United States, taking part in the massive exodus of refugees precipitated by the NEZ program. Today Vietnam is among the countries that are most vulnerable to sea-level rise. According to recent projections, by the year 2050 almost all the land in southern Vietnam could be engulfed, displacing twenty million people, or nearly one quarter of the country’s population.

In several works, Chung explores extreme flooding — a natural phenomenon that in Vietnam is exacerbated both by the construction of hydroelectric dams in the Mekong River Basin and by human-driven climate change-and proposes solutions. In 2010 she constructed stored in a jar: monsoon, drowning fish, color water, and the floating world, a large-scale model for a floating village. To create this utopian world, Chung drew a formal language from vernacular architecture throughout Asia and structured a city in emulation of actual floating communities: vessels and houseboats tethered together in Ha Long Bay in Vietnam; floating communities on Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia; a makeshift system of interconnected house-rafts on the Song Kalia River in Sangkhlaburi, Thailand; and camps of floating palaces on a network of rivers in Srinagar, India.

About Sarah Rosalena’s work pictured above-

To make Exit Point, Rosalena trained a neural network to combine the Blue Marble photo and the M87 black hole image and output the results to a mechanical loom, which materialized each pixel as a thread in a Jacquard textile. As the Jacquard loom is considered a predecessor to the modern computer, her textiles also challenge linear accounts of technological progress. Through the use of artificial intelligence, Rosalena creates coiling, looping, and spiraling temporalities that function as tools for examining our past and present.

About Bently Spang‘s War Shirt #6- Waterways, pictured above-

The Northern Cheyenne artist Bently Spang creates multidisciplinary artworks inspired by the utilitarian and artistic practices of his ancestors, the Tsitsistas/Suhtaio people. One of Spang’s first such projects was War Shirt #1 (1998), which he made by stitching together family photographs and film negatives, using the negatives as fringe. Spang notes that ancestral war shirts are “reciprocal garments” created by the community to shelter warriors as they battle to protect that community. In 2017 Mountain Time Arts in Bozeman, Montana, commissioned Spang to create a work that would explore the influence of climate change on water resources and raise awareness of the issue in the region. The result was War Shirt #6-Waterways (2017), a multimedia sculptural installation that takes the form of a Plains-style war shirt.

The body of War Shirt #6-Waterways is made up of twenty-one monitors and fringed with six digital still photographs. With the help of a local support team, Spang welded the steel armature and programmed the monitors to present a synchronous, multichannel video, which he filmed while walking from the Tongue River, a tributary of the Yellowstone River that traverses Montana and Wyoming, to a local spring on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation; the digital fringe presents images from a preserved plant press book collected by a tribal historian and ethnobotanist. “I’m telling the viewer to know your water, know where it comes from and how it gets to you, and then you can protect it,” says Spang. “We should all have a relationship with that water, with these places that the water manifests.”

About the Sandy Rodriguez work above-

Made during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the multilingual map of the greater Los Angeles area YOU ARE HERE / Tovaangar / El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula / Los Angeles (2021) draws inspiration from the region’s history. It includes depictions of the trial of Toypurina, an Indigenous woman who led a rebellion against the Mission San Gabriel in 1785, as well as sixteenth-century primary source materials, including the Florentine Codex (ca. 1529-69), an encyclopedic ethnographic study of central Mexico. YOU ARE HERE includes images of plants and animals used by Native peoples, which represent geographic locations and serve as indicators of the cardinal directions. Place-names are hand painted in English, Spanish, and Tongva to reference renaming in the region over time as a colonial act of aggression. Rodriguez wants visitors to encounter this painting as they might a way-finding map and to use it to reorient themselves in space and time. She studies, documents, and processes native botanical specimens that have healing properties to create pigments, inks, and watercolors, applying these handmade materials to amate paper made from the bark of trees in Puebla, Mexico. A symbol of Indigenous culture, this sacred pre-Columbian material was prohibited by the Spanish during the colonial period.

Pictured below is one of Yangkura’s “waste monsters”, Tongsinsa, and his film depicting the monster in public (him in the costume).

From the museum-

Working on the west coast of South Korea, Yangkura is a performance and installation artist who uses ordinary trash to represent the dynamics of foreign relations in northeast Asia. Provoked by the 2007 MT Hebei Spirit Oil Spill (HSOS), in which 10,900 tons of crude oil spilled into the sea and contaminated the Korean coastline, Yangkura has focused his practice on the effects of anthropogenic marine pollution. In 2013 he began collecting and categorizing the waste from North Korea, China, and Japan that washed ashore on the coast of South Korea. By tracing tidal movements, he established the migratory pattens for marine debris moving among these countries, discovering that Korea’s trash frequently makes its way to Tsushima Island in Japan. He suspects that this island’s unique geographic formation makes it behave like a vacuum for international garbage, allowing the waters east of Korea to stay relatively clean. As Yangkura’s research suggests, the litter collecting in our oceans does not recognize geopolitical boundaries.

In 2015 Yangkura began constructing “waste monsters” —whimsical, colossal trash costumes, each with its own fictive identity. Yangkura wears these costumes while stilt-walking in performances intended to draw public awareness to the grotesqueness of our collective marine pollution problem. While he recognizes other environmental activists attempting to shock the public into change, he does not believe this approach is sustainable. Instead, he prefers to broach the topic of anthropogenic pollution through storytelling, weaving fantastic, subliminal narratives to engage and educate. In 2017 Yangkura began working with Tsushima CAPPA, a Japanese environmental organization focused on promoting awareness of marine pollution and on cleaning Tsushima Island. He used this collaboration to create a new “monster,” a character he hoped would deftly underscore selfishness as a fundamental human problem. Forgotten Tongsinsa or Forgotten Messenger (2017-) is constructed from trash originating in Korea, China, and Japan recovered from the coast of Tsushima Island (the word tongsinsa refers to a messenger with a diplomatic purpose, and it was originally applied to envoys sent to Japan on goodwill missions during the Joseon era). Yangkura describes Forgotten Tongsinsa as a good monster who dearly misses home and is simply trying to find his way back again.

This exhibition closes 1/5/25.