Entering the exhibition from the gallery’s usual exit is a symbolic gesture by the artist to suggest that ‘point-of-no return’ discourses about our fragile world can be overcome.

We do not all breathe the same air (2018-ongoing), the continuing artwork from which the exhibition earns its title, has been carried out in numerous cities around the world. Visualizing air quality, the spectrum of dots in varying hues are samples of what we breathe. These dots reveal the spatial, racial, social, and political factors that determine whether one can exercise their right to clean air.

This unequal distribution is more important than ever, as environmental racism has proven once again to have disastrous, deathly consequences during the COVID-19 crisis.

Though inherently a virus cannot discriminate, the social systems in place can, and they guarantee that some will be infected while others will not and some will recover while others will not.

Bringing together particles of daily life with distant dust of the cosmos is Printed Matter(s) (2018), a series of photo giclée prints using special ink made of pollution extracted from the air in Mumbai. Depicting images of cosmic dust from the NASA Cosmic Dust Catalog, April 1982, this series unites vast spans of time and scale, from the depths of space to our current world.

The hidden particles of our atmosphere are brought to life by a single beam of light for Saraceno’s new installation Particular Matter(s) (2021), where earthly and cosmic dust particles are illuminated like millions of suspended galaxies and are stirred by visitors’ movements and breath.

Move from darkness into light in the final space for this gallery tour. Here, traces of breath are held in molten glass turned solid shaped by exhaled air. A method of glass blowing that has been used since the 1st century BC, Pneuma, Aeolus, Aeroscale, Aerosolar Serpens (2018-2021) seek to heighten our consciousness of breath and its layered meaning across cultures.

For Saraceno, this entanglement of breath and spirit filling and forming these glass shapes also helps to construct the question: who has the right to breathe?