Ochi Projects is pleased to present Johanna Breiding’s Playing Submarine, on view from February 6 – March 20, 2021. Playing Submarine consists of 19 photographic works and over 50 ceramic sculptures extracting themes of function, familiarity, loss and found.

Breiding’s ceramics pieces serve as vessels to both the intuitive and recognizable. They are sculptural and utilitarian objects that can carry water or serve wine, offering interactive tools to connect the environment to the communal body. The collection began with Breiding’s dream interpretations that explored the symbolic resonance of childhood memories and recurring imagery. Locating this dream world within an oceanic space of fluid meanings and symbiotic relations, Breiding created vessels of hybrid objects that combine fragmented human body parts and subaquatic, crustaceous creatures. Teetering between figuration and abstraction, the works explore the interconnections between human and nonhuman organic species, and play with the possibilities of intra-active companionship and interment. These vessels serve as invitations for future communal gatherings: drinking from and eating out of unusual queer objects that signal towards an ecocentric worldview of care-based relations.

The collection of photographs in the exhibition depict various landscapes, geographies of the body, snapshots of lovers, friends, mentors, and animals, in which each image exists and makes meaning in sequential relation to the other. In the series, Shelter, Between tongue and taste, and Morning Milk, concave images of a snow cave, a mouth agape spilling milk, and a pot on a burning stovetop offers curious observations into the capriciousness of home and nourishment, while simultaneously depicting the fierce conclusions of these confidential connections. In Self-portrait with scars, Breiding draws formal threads between scarred body parts, the hairs of long-time companions, and decaying flora in the landscape. Closely cropped to create an intimate and confined space within the frame, the photographs explore more haptic forms of image making. In some, Breiding plays with the obscuring capacities of water and mirrored surfaces to challenge the identifying gaze of portraiture. In others, Breiding foregrounds texture as a way to distort bodily distinctions. Together, the works contemplate on the corporeal and geographic marks of attachment and loss, and the queer connections that develop through mourning and recovery across human and nonhuman life forms.

Johanna Breiding works with photography, video, installation and collaboration to reinterpret historical events, putting the past into a meaningful transformative relation with the present, and giving voice and ground to underrepresented and marginalized communities. Their practice is committed to representing subjects that are marked “deviant” or illegible, and to experiment with forms of world-making that offer an alternative to state-sanctioned legitimation, and gendered and racialized hierarchies. It invites viewers to feel how resistance might move our bodies and to pay attention to the landscapes that hold us as we persist.

In Epitaph for Family (2015), which opened two days after the U.S. legalization of same-sex marriage, Breiding documented queer-identified perspectives on family and kinship. A key stake was to disclose how heteronormative family structures define the individual and society-at-large. The project includes a series of photographic queer still lifes that reconsider the dinner table as a metaphor for the horizon, a futurity not yet reached, by replacing familiar objects with their queered others. The video and photographic installation, The Rebel Body (2019) explores ongoing strategies of political persecution through the story of Anna Göldi in Glarus, Switzerland, a woman who was victim to the16th century witch-hunts. This project is a collaboration with curator and writer Shoghig Halajian, Marxist-Feminist writer and theorist Silvia Federici (Caliban and the Witch) and Glarus locals who retell Anna Göldi’s story in order to activate the resilience of remembering and the landscape as a site of memory-keeping. The video installation, Demonstrative Score (2018), also explores ‘landscape-memory’ and consists of an archival compilation of acts of protest that aim to dismantle public monuments of European historical leaders and Confederate soldiers, in collaboration with choreographer taisha paggett. The work responds to recent iconoclastic events that demand revisions to national narratives, and define history as a living document that warrants active engagement by marginalized and violated subjects.

Breiding attended Scripps College, the Glasgow School of Art and received their Masters from CalArts. They have exhibited work at art venues and museums including LAMAG (Los Angeles), Photo LA (Los Angeles), LAXART (Los Angeles), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Elga Wimmer Gallery (New York), the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco) and the Oakland Museum of California (Oakland). Breiding is a recipient of the 2017 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, and their work has been written about in Artforum, Hyperallergic, and Art in America amongst other publications. Originally from a small village in Switzerland, Johanna Breiding currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Williamstown, MA where they are an Assistant Professor of Art at Williams College.

*Accompanying text by Nico Maria Fuentes and Asa Mendelsohn

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