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Breathe:Lahore (2024)

Installed at different sites across the city of Lahore during the Lahore Biennale LB03 'Of Mountains and Seas'


For the Lahore Biennale 03 - 'Of Mountains and Seas' curated by John Tain (5th Oct - 8th Nov 2024) Dryden Goodwin created a new iteration of his artwork Breathe which was shown across Lahore, Pakistan. Appearing at iconic sites, including a projection at Bradlaugh Hall, as hundreds of posters along the Mall Road and over 1,500 digital billboards next to arterial roads across and around the city, Breathe:Lahore interacted with a population living in one of the world's most polluted mega-cities - faced with an increasingly severe public health crisis caused by declining air quality.
 
Breathe:Lahore marks the project's international city debut, with Goodwin growing the artwork to include drawings of Pakistani clean air campaigner Abid Omar, founder of the pioneering Pakistan Air Quality Initiative - a community-driven organisation that addresses the country's air pollution crisis through data, research, and advocacy. Goodwin's drawings of Abid join those he made of six London-based activists, including Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah CBE, who began her activism after the death of her 9-year-old daughter Ella - the first person in the world to have air pollution cited as a cause of death.
 
This year's installation across Pakistan's second-largest city comes at a crisis point for air pollution in the country and wider region. It is estimated that 98% of Pakistan's population live in areas where pollution levels exceed the country's air quality standards, with outdoor air pollution the second greatest threat to human health in the country, taking nearly 4 years off the life of the average Pakistani.
 
"As Breathe tours to each new city, it connects up a diverse and growing network of clean air activists, a worldwide 'collective' of individuals who each endeavour, with urgency and resistance, to bring about local transformation. Their actions contribute incrementally to confronting the global air pollution emergency and the need for radical and lasting change." Dryden Goodwin
 
With thanks to John Tain and the Lahore Biennale Team. Most of the documentation of the digital billboard was captured on CCTV by the Parks and Horticulture Department, Government of Punjab who supported the project
 
Installation documentation 'Breathe:Lahore' at the Lahore Biennale 03 'Of Mountains and Seas' (2024)
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