JOHANNA BREIDING - Home - OCHI PROJECTS · OCHI 3301 W WASHINGTON BLVD, LOS ANGELES, CA 90018 JOHANNA BREIDING EDUCATION 2010-2012 California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California

OCHI 3301 W WASHINGTON BLVD, LOS ANGELES, CA 90018 WWW.OCHIPROJECTS.COM

JOHANNA BREIDING

EDUCATION 2010-2012 California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California MFA Photography and Related Media Mentor: Allan Sekula/ Kaucyila Brooke 2002-2006 Scripps College, Claremont, California BA Art History and Fine Art Mentor: Ken Gonzales-Day 2004-2005 Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, Scotland Drawing, Painting & Print Making (Study Abroad) SELECT EXHIBITIONS 2019 (upcoming) The Rebel Body, Adjunct Position, Los Angeles, CA Souvenir, Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, CA 2018 Circle Around Roots, Solo Show at Galería Casa Lu, Mexico City The Rebel Body, Solo Show at Angels Gate Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA The Rebel Body, screening and artist talk at the Anna-Goldi Museum, Glarus, Switzerland 2017 Small Works for Big Change, group exhibition at Participant Inc,, NY Magic Hour (Epitaph for Family), Solo Show at the Oakland Museum of Art, curated by Christina Linden, Oakland, CA Work was acquired and belongs to the museum’s permanent collection. Animating the Archives, Group Show at Avenue 50 Gallery, curated by the founders of the Woman’s Building, Los Angeles, CA (Exhibition until June 3, 2017) Distance In/Formation (A video/photo installation and performance made in collaboration with Rebecca Bruno, Wilfried Souly and Yann Novak), at Lenzner Gallery/LACE, curated by Ciara Ennis and Robert Crouch, Claremont, CA A Matter of Fact, Group Show at Vermilion Sands, curated by Malene Dam, Kevin Malcolm & Nikolaj Stobbe, Copenhagen, Denmark 2016 Protuberances, Group Show at LAXART, curated by Catherine Taft and Jess Arndt, Los Angeles, CA Seduction of the Cyborg, Group Show at Human Resources Gallery, curated by David Frantz, Hannah Grossman and Simone Krug, Los Angeles, CA


Night Again Again, Video Installation in collaboration with Shoghig Halajian at the Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, CA homeLA, Victoria Park, in collaboration with Marbles Jumbo Radio and Yann Novak, curated by Rebecca Bruno, Los Angeles, CA Johanna Breiding + Geneva Skeen: Field Variations at South of Sunset, curated by Robert Crouch, Los Angeles, CA A Space Remembered, Group Show at Angels Gate Cultural Center, curated by Martabel Wasserman, San Pedro, CA 2015 Epitaph for Family, Solo Show, Human Resources Gallery, curated by Shoghig Halajian, Los Angeles, CA VOTED BEST EXHIBITION IN LA BY ART IN AMERICA http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/best-of-2015-los-angeles/ Crank, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA We Love Our Parents, We Fear Snakes, Solo/Collaborative Project and Residency through WCCW (where I invited Marbles Jumbo Radio and Yann Novak to collaborate and participate), at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA One After Another, In Succession at Charlie James Gallery, my first Curatorial Project with featured works by Carmen Argote, Johanna Breiding, Harry Dodge, Charles Gaines, Ken Gonzales-Day, Tyler Matthew Oyer, Dylan Mira, Julie Tolentino, Alice Wang and Kim Zumpfe. A text by Hanna Wildow and Litia Perta, Los Angeles, CA Following Vito Acconci, Adobe Gallery, Solo Project, curated by Nathalie Brilliant, San Francisco, CA Fade In/Fade Out, 356 Broadway, Los Angeles, CA Emily O Inauguration, 4670 York, curated by Kim Zumpfe, Los Angeles, CA 60 Americans, Elga Wimmer Gallery, curated by Terrence Sanders, Chelsea, NY Photo LA, L.A. Mart, curated by CalArts MFA Photo department, Los Angeles, CA 2014 Heat/Pool, Verdens Ende Kunstforening, curated by Anne Guro Larsman, Tjøme, Norway Re-Think Environment, Human Resources Gallery, curated by Martabel Wasserman, Los Angeles, CA Seaton Street Screening, Film Screening, Seaton Studio, curated by Heather O’Brien, Los Angeles, CA Photo LA, L.A. Mart, curated by CalArts MFA Photo department, Los Angeles, CA 2013 MOLT! Speculative Identities, (Asterism Derivative), Kreuzberger Atelierhof, Berlin, Germany QAC (Queer Arts Collective), Group Show, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, CA Art Sale,Workspace, curated by Daniel Ingroff, Los Angeles, CA 2012 Somewhere between Magic and Science, Solo Show, Hahmajärventie Gallery, curated by Asterism Derivative, Haukijärvi, Finland Artist as Traveler, Galerie der Hochschule, Braunschweig Kunstschule, Braunschweig, Germany MMXII, CalArts MFA Graduate Exhibition, L.A. Mart, curated by Catherine Taft, Los


Angeles, CA Touch Magic Like Smoke and Bone, Solo Show (Asterism Derivative), Gallery 402, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, CA Untitled, Susan Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles, CA We Got Next, Untitled Art Projects Gallery, Los Angeles, CA American Folk Anthologies, Gallery 403, Group Show, California Institute of the Arts, curated by Cody Edison, Los Angeles, CA 2011 Perverse/Reverse, Gallery D301, California Institute of the Arts, curated by Asterism Derivative, Los Angeles, CA Next to Nothing, The Farley Building, Los Angeles, CA Place From Which One Speaks, Main Gallery, California Institute of the Arts, curated by Michelle Dizon, Los Angeles, CA Heroic Distortions and Narrative Strategies, Human Resources, curated by Kaucyila Brooke and Malene Dam, Los Angeles, CA Pith Show, Gallery D301, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, CA Jeunes Talents Exhibition, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Paris, France, New York, NY Miami, FL and Los Angeles, CA 2010 White Narcissus/Backstage Carnage, Solo Show, Gallery D300, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, CA RESIDENCIES/AWARDS/ACQUISITIONS 2018 Shandaken/ Storm King Art Center Residency, NY Casa Lu Artist Residency, Mexico City, Mexico 2017 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant Acquisition – Magic Hour acquired into the Oakland Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection 2016 Magic Hour (Epitaph for Family) has been acquired into the Oakland Museum of Art’s permanent collection 2015 The World That Begins Where Our Skin Ends, Artist Residency, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA 2014 Summerforum, Artist Residency, Joshua Tree, CA 2012 DAAD Grant Recipient Arteles, Artist Residency, FINLAND Braunschweig Kunstschule, GERMANY


2011 Jeunes Talents Residency, Arles & Paris, FRANCE Dean's Grant, CalArts, CA Bartmen Grant, CalArts, CA 2010 Ahmanson Foundation Scholarship, Los Angeles, CA Dean's Grant, CalArts, CA 2006 Lucia Suffel Award, Scripps College, CA Mellon Grant, Scripps College, CA LECTURES/ARTIST TALKS 2017 Artist Talk at Scripps College, Senior Artist Seminar Series, Claremont, CA Artist Talk at SSU’s Queer Lecture Series, Sonoma State, Sonoma, CA 2016 Artist Lecture Series at UC Irvine, Irvine, CA Just Speak Nearby: The Politics & Practices of Art Writing at 356 Mission Gallery, Los Angeles, CA at land’s edge, LACA (Los Angeles Contemporary Archive) Tir Journal, Pieter Space, Los Angeles, CA 2015 SFAI San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA CalArts Walt Disney Family Museum, San Francisco, CA New York Film Academy, Burbank, CA Tir Talk, Human Resources Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Analog Dissident, Los Angeles, CA Cerritos College, Norwalk, CA KChung Radio, Los Angeles, CA 2014 CalArts, Valencia, CA


SAN PEDRO

Johanna Breiding ANGELS GATE CULTURAL CENTER 3601 South Gaffey Street January 27 - March 17

Johanna Breiding’s exhibition begins with an account of the last (documented) persecuted witch in Europe, Anna Göldi. Unlike the majority of her rumored coven, Göldi met her fate at the chopping block, in 1782, rather than the gallows—cutting her short at the neck. Here, the artist provides a historical revision, a consideration of similarly oppressed peoples. The focal piece is Breiding and Shoghig Halajian’s THE REBEL BODY, 2018, a video documenting their pursuit of Göldi through the springtime snowmelt of Switzerland, and their meeting with Silvia Federici, the author of Caliban and the Witch (2004), the book from which this piece, and the show itself, takes its title. In a nod to the present day, Breiding places images of her journeys to the witches’ towns against blurred footage from the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri, riots, an aide-mémoire to the many people who met their end on the executioner’s scaffold and its modern American equivalent: the street. In the looping video Demonstrative Score, 2017, Breiding edits together images of falling monuments to contentious historical figures, and one wonders if memorials are required as evidence of history. This piece is synced with another video, featuring the artist taisha paggettperforming gestures from the aforementioned archival footage against a stark white backdrop. Her body, an African American one, is the only fully present figure in the exhibition. On the opposite wall, the obstinacy of these video works is buffered by Breiding’s quietly insurgent photographic installation of queer intimacy, Slippage/Spillage, 2015–18. One recurring motif is the time between winter and spring, when things long dormant or buried are revealed. This is seen, for example, in the digital C-print Haute Route––Somewhere Between Chamonix and Zermatt, 2016, depicting a search party descending a snowcapped Swiss mountain. Here is a cooperative venture to exhume those rubbed out from the story.

-Meg Whiteford


Finding Kinship with Witchcraft in the Fight Against Patriarchy

An exhibition revisits the life of the last European woman to be executed for witchcraft.

-Abe Ahn February 15, 2018

Johanna Breiding, “Liberty Enlightening the World (July 4, 1776)” (2017), gelatin silver print (all

images by the author for Hyperallergic) LOS ANGELES — In 1782 Anna Göldi became the last European woman to be executed for witchcraft. The Swiss woman and domestic servant had previously run afoul of authorities and lived as a fugitive before her death. At a younger age, she was held responsible for her firstborn child’s death and sentenced to house arrest. She skipped town and managed to settle in the nearby town of Glarus where she found work as a maid. At 47, she was accused by her employer of trying to magically “poison” one of his daughters with needles, although the true intent of the accusation might have been to prevent her from revealing an affair. More than 200 years later, the Swiss government exonerated Göldi of her crime, acknowledging her death as a violation of human rights and erecting a memorial to her in the town in which she was


executed. Anna Göldi’s story is the through-line of Johanna Breiding’s exhibition at the Angels Gate Cultural Center, which begins with a video installation depicting the small, mountainous town of Glarus where Göldi was killed and buried. The short film (a collaboration with curator Shoghig Halajian and scored by artist Dorian Wood) features still shots of the Swiss town’s verdant hills and present-day calm, contrasting the brutal persecution of centuries past. An interview with feminist scholar Silvia Federici provides some historical context through her book, Caliban and The Witch, which theorizes how the transition from feudalism to capitalism consigned poor women like Anna Göldi to strict gender roles and undermined their ability to control their reproductive and labor power.

Johanna Breiding and Shoghig Halajian, still from “The Rebel Body” (2018)

In Federici’s scholarship, the rebel body resists church and state authorities that seek to subjugate women and gender-nonconforming people. The witch hunts of the past sought to punish those who dared to claim ownership of their own pleasure and labor, or seek out autonomy outside of the traditional family and state. In The Rebel Body, Anna Göldi’s story and the landscape surrounding Glarus serve as a kind of memorial to the collective rebellion of women and queer people across history. Witchcraft becomes a source of belonging and kinship rather than a mark of disgrace and humiliation. It frames Göldi’s life and death as belonging to a long line of defiant individuals who dared to survive in spite of patriarchal violence.


Johanna Breiding and taisha paggett, installation view of “Demonstrative Score” (2017), two-

channel video

For the exhibition, Breiding collaborated with artist taisha paggett to reenact other historical moments in which rebellious individuals challenged state power and authority. In the two-channel video installation “Demonstrative Score,” we see, on one screen, the removal of Confederate statues in the US and the toppling of Communist statues in post-Soviet Europe; on the adjacent screen, taisha paggett mirrors the physical gestures, like the tugging of rope, that lead to the destruction of monuments representing patriarchal figures. At first, the connection between Göldi’s life and the toppling of offensive monuments might seem unexpected. But next to Göldi’s story, this video shows a different outcome for rebellious bodies — one that can avoid suffering and martyrdom.

In “Liberty Enlightening the World,” Breiding has taken a screen capture of a YouTube video about famous landmarks that narrowly avoided destruction. The image shows the Statue of Liberty, and a subtitle in mid-sentence: “that it was totally rusted through in a number of places, particularly in her torch and crown.” The monument’s near-destruction and rusting in key places seem to set up the possibility of symbolically


upheaving the American project and its tawdry enlightenment ideals. Here, Lady Liberty is at the verge of going the way of Confederate and Soviet heroes, relics to be uprooted and knocked down to build an alternative structure.

In “Slippage / Spillage,” Breiding has collected personal photographs and found images: fragments of bodies, family photographs, and odd details, like handprints on the hull of a ship or a smudged portrait of René Descartes, presented out of context. The constellation of images, while deeply intimate and sometimes strange, doesn’t always connect with the rest of the show’s content. However, in all this looking and archiving, the artist seems to be continuing her search for Anna Göldi and others like her, with traces of personal memory and collective histories spilling into the present.


Best of 2017: Our Top 10 Los Angeles Art Shows This year Los Angeles showcased especially diverse and robust exhibitions, thanks in part to an enormous initiative around Latin American and Latino art. December 20, 2017

John Hulsey and Johanna Breiding: break down, re source at the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive

John Hulsey, The Land Under Iron (DTLA), 2017, HD video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

December 1, 2017–January 6, 2018 With break down, re source, two artists — John Hulsey and Johanna Breiding — both reflect upon geography and land use in the American West and the colonizing desires that have historically driven speculation and development. Hulsey’s video installation “The Land Under Iron” depicts a highway sign with repurposed text that interrupts a site of construction in Downtown Los Angeles and a former site of naval conquest at San Pedro’s Fort MacArthur. Breiding’s photograph “End of the Line” shows a rubbing of a historical marker in the town of Keeler, which figured in the California Water Wars and the history of analogue photography. Her sensual use of frottage speaks volumes: in a city experiencing an urgent housing and homelessness crisis — in which the art world has been implicated — break down, re source revisits the narratives and scrutinizes the underlying desires that have scarred and shaped this stolen land. —HNK


RemaHortMannFoundationAwards2017EmergingArtGrantees

ByElizaJordan TheRemaHortMannFoundation(RHMF)isafoundationthatfundstravelandotheraccommodationsforthefamiliesofcancerpatients,andinhonorofMichaelandSusanHort’sdaughterwhopassedawayin1995fromstomachcancer.InOctober2016,thefoundationinvitedover50distinguishedartworldinsiderstonominatetwoemergingartistsoftheirchoiceforthe2017RHMFgrant—a$10,000unrestrictedcashprizeforeightrecipients.Thefoundationisalsosetouttoprovidegrantsandcommunity-basedgrantstoemergingartistswhodemonstrateaconsiderablecontributiontothearts,anditisanomination-onlyapplication.Withapositiveturnout,resultinginoneofthelargestandmostimpressivepooloftalentsincethegrant’sfoundation,thisyearprovidedthefoundationwitheightstellarwinners:JohannaBreiding,NikitaGale,AimeeGoguen,LaehGlenn,AnnHirsch,GalaPorras-Kim,ChristinaQuarles,andPaulSepuya.Thegroupputforthanarrayofimpressiveworks,suchasacryliconcanvaspieces,digitalc-prints,andevena30-minuteperformancebyHirsch.

Chosenfromover100applicants,therecipientswereselectedbyanesteemedcommittee:NaimaKeith,DeputyDirectorofExhibitionsandProgramsattheCaliforniaAfricanAmericanMuseum;SusanHort,RemaHortMannFoundation;CatherineTaft,DeputyDirectorandCuratorofLAXArt;JamillahJames,CuratorattheInstituteofContemporaryArt;andartistAnthonyPearson.


Overlooking the Port of LA, an Exhibit Considers Sustainability Raquel GutiérrezMarch 29, 2016 SAN PEDRO, Calif. — According to its history page, the Port of Los Angeles — the number one port by container volume and cargo value in the entire United States — handled 8.1 million units in 2015 alone. As the primary entry point for trade between the United States and Asia, the port and its shipping suppliers manage the coming and going of cargo in state-of-the-art marine terminal facilities, along with the largest workforce of skilled longshore labor in the country, warehouse and trans-loading centers to meet the needs of every shipper, “the nation’s largest and newest drayage fleet, and rail connections that offer frequency and speed-to-market access to major freight hubs across the U.S.”

The Port is situated upon one of the most gorgeous stretches of the Pacific coastline, creating a visual dissonance where 20th-century mechanical aesthetics compete with the oceanic nature that continues to serve as an inspiration to countless artists and curators. All of this is evident in the current exhibition Hold Up, organized by Curator of Community Engagement Martabel Wasserman at the Angel’s Gate Cultural Center (AGCC) in San Pedro. Participating artists were invited to respond to a prompt about sustainability as it relates to its own Latin origin: sustinere (from tenere, “to hold,” and sup, “up”). The phrase evokes a set of conflicting images, such as obstruction and foundation.

The mission of this ambitious exhibition proposes the idea that “to change personal and collective patterns to ensure that life on the planet can be sustained will create roadblocks, rerouting us to explore unchartered terrain.” The exhibition gestures to the land and sea present in the artistic imaginary of San Pedro, where viewers get to take in “reimagined vehicles wobbling across scrutinized infrastructure,” such as in the installation work “Bridging Blue and Green” (2016), where artist José Córdova presents a 3-D version of the signature San Pedro bridge as an activated conceptual


route where birds announce the arrival of seasons and ocean temperatures indicate climate change. Córdova’s installation, presented in hues of green and blue, also

invites spectators to write upon his mini-structure as a way to understand the imagined relational tensions between the port and the ocean, modernity and nature.

Hold Up is Wasserman’s first exhibition at AGCC, and the show avows the inextricable link that her curatorial approach has to political organizing, including work from artists like Ken Ehrlich, who explores these themes in three wall-sized drawings of the internal organs of the shipping containers endemic to the port. His elaborate titles — such as “Untitled (By going global with its supply chains, capital is creating the opportunity for global working class struggle. In order for such struggles to succeed we need to know how the present composition of capital works. The craft worker and the mass worker knew how the system produced commodities in their day; we need to develop such knowledge today. – Brian Ashton)” — espouse Marxist theory in abstracted textual stanzas, thus producing an understanding of the evolution of the container crane in the Port’s history while focusing on tactical organizing. Ardent is Wasserman’s desire to appeal to a diverse group, including union members, the Los Angeles left, artists, students, and locals who regularly attend Angel’s Gate Cultural Center events. Wasserman, whose work makes clear her goal of bridging community art with emerging and established artists outside San Pedro, sees the imperative of opening up a space for play and praxis that is anchored to a place with such a layered history.

“The built and natural environments surrounding Angels Gate make it a uniquely charged place,” Wasserman told Hyperallergic in an email interview. “Many aspects of the site are preserved as part of Historic Fort MacArthur. Overlaid with military landmarks are clues that this is a sacred site for the Tvunga, such as fire pits where sweat lodges used to be.”

Other artists in the show balance political critique with a measured, abstracted approach. One of the highlights of the exhibition is “A Portrait” (2015) by photographer Johanna Breiding, which, as expressed in the piece’s artist statement, “begins with


death and ends with the sea.” This piece references an anonymous letter to Bill Gates after his acquisition of a 1885 Winslow Homer painting called “Lost on the Grand Banks,” which Breiding signals to in the video element of the installation. In addition to showcasing Breiding’s photography practice, “A Portrait” is an intertextual and pleasurable genre-promiscuous work that extends her photographic work into video and installation, yielding an experiential pathos upon the quiet meditation she gifts to

viewers on art, commerce, and her friendship with the late American photographer, writer, filmmaker, theorist, and critic Allan Sekula.

Viewers are also treated to textually immersive wall works by poet and artist Marcus Civin, whose “Baltimore Call and Response” (2016) is the kind of exhortation that gets the blood boiling as it produces questions that pry open possibilities against aggressive accounting, for life under capitalism, impromptu performance, and long-term action. Civin’s other piece, “Act Like Americans 2” (add year) dropkicks with a biting critical attention to the attenuated ways that debt continues to saturate our creative realities in the harsh belabored landscape that runs parallel to the exhibition’s leitmotif.

The exhibition will close with a live performance by Ba Na Na, composed of Drew Denny and JD Samson (founding member of electro-punk bands MEN and Le Tigre, respectively), that interrogates the implications of easily espoused beliefs about environmentalism as a performative gesture to the physically impressive landscape that surrounds the grounds of Angel’s Gate Cultural Center. Be sure to arrive with plenty of time to take in the sunset over both the ocean and the sea of industrial machinery.


LOS ANGELES

“Protuberances” LAXART 7000 Santa Monica Blvd. September 17 - October 29

Park McArthur suggested in this past summer’s issue of Artforum that identity is an expandable pocket, “like the bottomless velvet bags used at magic shows.” In a parallel universe, I imagine that this pocket looks a lot like A. K. Burns and Katherine Hubbard’s In Spirit of “Knuckles” the Handbag, 2014, in this group show. Both campy and base, it is at once a crocheted purse and a plastic bag, encrusted with doorknobs, ceramic mug handles, utility knives, a quartz crystal, and a papier-mâché hand. This exterior appears to be about a hand’s work—the array of objects we take hold of to hurt, heal, and nourish our bodies and those of others. Any promise of efficacy is nearly voided by the exhausted proliferation of forms; yet still it persists as this pocket, this bag. Naotaka Hiro’s performance-based videos such as Ass Gong, 2010, and Peaking, 2016, along with a related sculpture, Peak, 2016, stand sentinel over the main space of the exhibition. His is a more claustrophobic take on Carolee Schneemann’s Up to and Including Her Limits, 1973–76—the whirling lines he draws from inside a large canvas bag (there it is again, the pocket!) echoing the spinning cast-bronze ass gong, which once every three minutes is ceremoniously beaten. Elsewhere, smaller, quieter works hold court: Bashir Naim’s short, looped dance Improvisation, 2015, displayed on a cracked iPhone, and Johanna Breiding’s velvety photograph titled Still Life with Octopus and Inverted Basketballs, 2015. These are only a few of the works that elucidate the possibilities of bodies and the expanse of identity.

— Andy Campbell


NEWS Dec 20, 2015

Best of Los Angeles, 2015

by LankaTattersall

Johanna Breiding, “Epitaph for Family,” at Human Resources

Breiding’s meditation on the broad horizon of what it means to be a queer family opened on the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling that same-sex marriage is a national legal right in the United States. The timing of this immersive, contemplative exhibition could not have been more apt. Taking the motif of the horizon as a point of departure, Breiding juxtaposed 16mm films of the sea’s horizon in the crepuscular hours with a multi-channel video of queer artists and activists seated at tables in their homes while they reflected on the complex question of how families, especially non-normative ones, might exist in the present. Breiding’s rhyming of the intangible perspectival view of the sea with the edge of the speakers’ tables, and the shifting positions of the videos’ participants between speakers and listeners suggested notions of “family” that are fluid and built through continual redefinition.

Documents

JOHANNA BREIDING - Home - OCHI PROJECTS · OCHI 3301 W WASHINGTON BLVD, LOS ANGELES, CA 90018 JOHANNA BREIDING EDUCATION 2010-2012 California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California