Souvenir

Opening Reception:
Friday, March 10, 7 to 10pm

Artists\' Talk
Friday, March 10, 7pm

Souvenir is a collaborative project by Ohan Breiding and Shoghig Halajian that coalesces two seemingly disparate stories together—a family member\'s experience of surviving a tsunami while snorkeling and the longest transoceanic journey of marine organisms. It documents plastic debris that traveled from Tōhoku, Japan across the Pacific Ocean over the span of a decade and washed ashore on the Pacific Northwest coast of North America in 2022, covered with a diverse ecosystem of marine life. Presented as a video and photographic installation, Souvenir employs various image technologies—including an underwater camera, a cell phone, a drone camera—to build a visual vocabulary that can speak to the multi-scalar impacts of personal and ecological loss, and to speculate on how marine life can shed light on new strategies of survival across species and coasts. 

Ohan Breiding interviewed about this installation in BOMB magazine, 4/12/23.


Souvenir included in the major museum exhibition TIME. From Dürer to Bonvicini, Kuntshaus Zürich, September 22, 2023–January 14, 2024.

Ohan Breiding works in photography, video and varying forms of collaboration to depict the importance of kinship via active listening, historical events, and the landscape as witness. They employ a queer-feminist lens to the discussion of ecological care and invite viewers to feel how resistance might move our bodies and to pay attention to the water and landscapes that hold us as we persist. Breiding has exhibited their work nationally and internationally and has received numerous awards including the DAAD, the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award, the Powers Fund Grant, Hellman Award and the SIFF Award for the film made with Shoghig Halajian and the participation of Silvia Federici (author of Caliban and the Witch) and Glarus residents, The Rebel Body. They were a 2021 TBA Academy Ocean Fellow and are represented by Ochi Projects in Los Angeles. Their work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Artillery and Whitewall. Ohan Breiding is an Assistant Professor in the Art and Art History Department at Williams College in Massachusetts and lives between Williamstown and Brooklyn.

www.ohanbreiding.com

Shoghig Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles. She serves on the Board of Directors at Human Resources LA, and previously was Assistant Director at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). She is co-editor of the online journal Georgia, in collaboration with Anthony Carfello and Suzy Halajian, which is supported by a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She has presented projects at the Hammer Museum and the ONE Archives at USC Libraries in Los Angeles; Le Magasin-National Center for Contemporary Art in Grenoble; Al Ma\'mal Foundation for Art in Jerusalem, UKS in Oslo, among others. She was a 2021 Research Fellow at Ocean Space-TBA 21 in Venice. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History, Theory and Criticism with a Critical Gender Studies emphasis at University of California, San Diego, where her research explores contemporary queer aesthetics and performance through a critical race lens, focusing on artistic experiments with collaboration.

www.georgiageorgia.org