Archive and Absence: Ohan Breiding
Installation view of Beside the Sun, 2025. Photograph by Matthew Sherman, courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery.
In A.I.R.’s gallery space by the windy Brooklyn waterfront, Ohan Breiding’s Beside the Sun applies an ecofeminist eye to an American archive, turning the camera’s lens towards the lands and animals of the American midwest.
Notation for a Wounded Land (Selection from the Killed Negative Archive) (2025) is an assemblage of 59 reproductions of original gelatin silver prints which document agrarian life in America during the Great Depression, originally commissioned by the Farm Security Administration in 1935. While the project was meant to document the realities of agrarian life preceding and following the Great Depression, the archive was specifically meant to underscore “human hardships,” leading to the discard of the images which Breiding compiles here.
This is not the first time Breiding’s work has reanimated neglected histories. The artist’s experimental documentary Belly of a Glacier (2025) brings viewers into an archive of glacier cores, an archive of ice rife with symbolism in a world facing climate catastrophe. THE REBEL BODY (2019–), made in collaboration with curator and researcher Shoghig Halajian and scholar and activist Silvia Federici, compiles photo and video footage to tell the story of Anna Göldi, “the last European witch to be executed (1782) in Switzerland.” Much like THE REBEL BODY, Notation for a Wounded Land also considers the landscapes as a witness to “buried histories of injustices”.
One might question how or why an assemblage of archival photographs could constitute an artwork which serves as the meat of an exhibition, but one only has to see it to understand. These rejected images are each marked with a hole punch, a practice which Roy Stryker, head of the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), became notorious for. There are holes in the fields, holes in the pigs and in the bedrock and the barn. The image in the center of the grid features a snowy residential street with great dark circles stabbed through the earth and sky. The sorrowful symbolism of these orb-like absences creates an eeriness so captivating that it would be difficult to divert one’s attention to the show's sculptural pieces, were one of them not positioned on the floor in front of Notation for a Wounded Land.
Installation view of Beside the Sun featuring Lovers (Earth Auger Bits), 2025. Photograph by Matthew Sherman, courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery.
Lovers (Earth Auger Bits) (2025) features beeswax sculptures of two augers, a drill bit often used for creating deep, precise holes in wood or soil to plant trees and install fence posts. While the choice of beeswax material is meant to transform these drill renderings “into something tactile, spiritual, and warm,” [1] it is perhaps more powerful to recognize them for what they are. One might imagine that these bits drilled the holes in the image-record dominating the wall—that the hole they’ve drilled might materialize in the middle of the floor and swallow its audience whole.
The presence of these drills makes what is done to the archive into the material language of the land. The perforated soil is removed from its context, as the images of the land are removed from the human narratives to which they are essential. In Enclosure (2025), the spokes of the fence lean against the wall as though torn from the soil. These objects, too, are torn from their contexts, just as the photographs of the earth and animals that were—and remain—at the core of agrarian life were excluded from an archive of the lives these ecosystems built.
While the sculptures contribute to the conceptual narrative of the exhibition in this way, they almost seem like an afterthought when compared to the gravity of the images that Breiding has assembled. Seeing as Breiding’s oeuvre as a whole has practiced the art of restoring the archive, it’s not surprising that Notation for a Wounded Land is executed with great care, and as a result delivers its message with impactful emotional weight.
The exhibition text emphasizes the role that earth and animal-made materials play in the process of developing a photograph, noting the silver salts which the augers extract from the earth and the gelatin made of the hooves of farm animals. While Leakage 1 (2025), an original photograph of pigs bladders full of water, positions these organs as memento mori rather than agrarian commodities, it does not suspend the eye in fascination the way that the massive assemblage of archival images does. Notations for a Wounded Land makes you want to be in a room surrounded by these images marred with the voids of crosses and holes. You are drawn in by the presence of absence, which says more than any other sculpture or photograph ever could.
Detail from Notation for a Wounded Land (Selection from the Killed Negative Archive), photo by Katya Borkov.
Ohan Breiding: Beside the Sun is on view at A.I.R. Gallery from March 2 to April 20, 2025.
[1] For further reading, see exhibition text for Beside the Sun, written by Svetlana Kitto.
