The World's Heaving Breath

Under the Fishead Lab “Flowing Banquet” 2026 art program, We are happy to announce the first exhibition project:

  THE WORLD’S HEAVING BREATH  March 5th - May 17th

       A project by Yin Shuai  and Khemerin Vismara，The title of  exhibition is inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1922 masterpiece Sonnets to Orpheus, explores the rhythmic vitality of breath as a medium for connection responding the contemporary situation.

  The exhibition is a dialogue across five distinct "actions," each lasting ten days. Five groups of artists: Marie Cool & Fabio Balducci (FR, 1961; IT, 1964) , Bart Houwers (NL, 1997) , Liu Ding (CN, 1976) , Juan Pablo Macias (MX, 1974) and Margherita Moscardini (IT, 1981) from diverse backgrounds, interwoven like the rise and fall of a breath. 

       Their contributions, analogous to the movement of inhalation and exhalation, arise autonomously while remaining indissolubly intertwined, shaping a collective discourse on the dynamics of the perceptual phenomenon and on the establishment of meaning through the tools embedded in artistic production.Their critical gaze is an invitation to empirically attempt to respect the nature of our abandoned bonds and to rediscover possibilities of inhabiting the order of the world despite the anticipation of its progressive instability.

Curators’ Statement：

Thirty years into the era of globalization, we appear to possess infinite possibilities for establishing a connection with the "world." However, a social reality increasingly defined by the extreme concentration of power serves as a stark reminder that these connections are neither equitable nor entirely authentic; indeed, they often facilitate a form of invisible separation.

The exhibition project, The World’s Heaving Breath, draws its inspiration from Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1922 masterpiece, Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke perceived the rhythmic vitality of breath as the very soul of poetry. Through the act of breathing, the "I" as a subject is enabled to communicate with the "other I," achieving a profound interconnectedness with the world. This notion compels us to reconsider the nature of our links and our "ways of seeing."

Their contributions, analogous to the movement of inhalation and exhalation, arise autonomously while remaining indissolubly intertwined, shaping a collective discourse on the dynamics of the perceptual phenomenon and on the establishment of meaning through the tools embedded in artistic production. Their critical gaze is an invitation to empirically attempt to respect the nature of our abandoned bonds and to rediscover possibilities of inhabiting the order of the world despite the anticipation of its progressive instability.

The exhibition unfolds across five distinct "actions," each lasting ten days and centering on the work of a single artist. Though these artists originate from diverse backgrounds, they share a common vision of reality. Like the rise and fall of a breath, their contributions emerge independently yet remain inextricably interwoven, forming a collective discourse on artistic media and the dynamics of perception. In an era of concentrated power and fractured connectivity, it is only by returning to the most fundamental acts of 'breathing' and 'seeing'—and by reclaiming a respect for the 'labor' and 'circumstance' of every individual—that we may rediscover an authentic connection with the world.

Biography

Artists：

Margherita Moscardini

(Born Italy. Lives and works in Livorno, IT)

Her works on the relations among transformation processes of urban, social and natural order belonging to specific geographies. She often focuses on abandoned and under demolition, whereby the demolitions’ waste system becomes a paradigm of the local complexities. Her practice favours the process and long-term projects, considering the context as a medium: the existing architecture, the landscape (meant as geo-morphological features) where the material environment is designed on, how the urban plans condition the behaviours of local communities. The context often suggests specific issues, materials and methods of the work, which she carries out through large-scale interventions, drawings, writings, scale models and video-documents.

Bart Houwers
(Born in The Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam, NL）

His design focuses on large-scale, site-specific installations and speculative research that critique the fetish of perpetual economic growth and examine how growth-driven logic shapes landscapes, infrastructures, cultural values, and the psychological realities of farming communities. Working with pre-existing materials, he constructs fragmented and displaced structures that redirect movement and reframe familiar environments, approaching transformations obliquely through detours, material traces, and altered viewpoints. His work reveals the intertwined relations between industry, land, and community, showing how these dynamics surface in the built and cultivated landscapes around us and inviting reflection on the social, ecological, and material consequences of contemporary production.

Juan Pablo Macias

(Born in Mexico. Lives and works in Livorno, IT)

His work explores the relation between systems of representation and affectivity, and analogically, between power knowledge and insurrectional knowledge. With his actions, interventions and work on archives, he intends to cause tensions between institution, art practice and social field, abandoning flat semantics by producing programs that operate directly on the biological, social and economic bodies.

Liu Ding
(Born in China. Lives and works in Beijing, CN)

His research-based practice spans painting, theatre production, curatorial projects, and theoretical work, investigating the mechanisms and rules of the art system. Through contrasts between historical and present archetypes, he examines shifting notions of the model citizen, the role of artists and intellectuals in society, and the conditions of cultural production and historical knowledge. His practice explores multiple viewpoints and modes of description, tracing discursive trajectories that continually experiments with new forms of engagement and critique, exploring how artworks, institutions, and audiences intersect while broadening possibilities for understanding subjectivity.

Marie Cool Fabio Balducci
(Born in France; Italy. Live and work in Paris, FR)

Their practice centres on actions performed with everyday objects and normed industrial materials, through which they test the concept of ownership and expose the futility of attempting to possess or achieve visual ascendancy over them. By employing standardised, easily accessible components and elementary gestures, they dissolve hierarchies between the inanimate and the animate, between space and the action performed within it, foregrounding a principle of reciprocity inherent in possession. Repetition and striking slowness introduce a poetic element that breaks with production norms, shifting attention from outcome to process and suspending the expectation of a finished result, inviting the viewer to experience the present not as representation but as analogy and contingent relation.

Curators:

Yin Shuai

(Born in China. He lives and works in Milan, IT)

He is a curator who lives and works in Milan. He has collaborated with FM Centre for Art Contemporary (Milan) since 2015 and became a lecturer at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) in 2018. In 2019, he founded the AP Project. His articles and exhibition reviews are published in Segno, Mousse Magazine, Public Art, L@ ft, The Art Newspaper, and other art magazines. His project “Death-Ray on the Coral Island” is selected as Emerging Curators Projects 2021(Powerstation of Art, Shanghai, 2021), “Infancy and History” is selected as finalist of research-based exhibition 2019 (OCAT Institute, Beijing).

Khemerin Vismara

(Born in Cambodia. He lives and works in Milan, IT)

His research approaches artistic processes as sites of inquiry into historical re-perception and ethical transformation, focusing on how culture is transmitted, circulated, and contested. Informed by an interdisciplinary orientation, his work is conceived as an organisational, interpretative, and documentary practice developed within collaborative contexts. He traces the relational frameworks through which legacies are constructed, interrogating their authorship and the mediating devices through which events become legible as structuring elements in the understanding and visualization of change within contemporary states of politicised uncertainty.

Schedule of Exhibition

March 5th - 15th Margherita Moscardini

March 19th - 29th Bart Houwers

April 9th - 19th Juan Pablo Macias

April 23th - May 3rd Liu Ding

May 7th - 17th Marie Cool Fabio Balducci

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Opening & Act 1 Margherita Moscardini