‘We’re All Breathing the Same Air’: How Jeppe Hein’s Participatory Art Project United Schoolchildren and Heads of State During Climate Week

Take a deep breath. That’s what Danish artist Jeppe Hein is
asking the public to do as part of his participatory art project
Breath With Me, which invites passerby to exhale while
painting parallel vertical blue lines on canvas.

The project began as a way for Hein to center himself as he
battled a serious illness, but expanded to encompass a broader
group of participants and a quest for healing on a much more
monumental scale. On view in New York’s Central Park—and coinciding
with a show of Hein’s work at 303 Gallery in Chelsea—the piece
measures 10 feet tall and 600 feet long.

After painting a line, Hein told artnet News, “you look up at
the blue sky and you say ‘I feel good because I can breathe.’”

His message resonates all the more during New York City’s
Climate Week, which runs through September 29 and coincides with
the UN Climate Change Summit. Breathe With
Me had a presence at the UN too, thanks to Danish
art nonprofit ART 2030, which has dedicated itself to
staging art projects that support the UN’s 17-point agenda
for global sustainable development.

Hein and ART2030 had already gotten the permits to stage the
project in Central Park—New York’s communal backyard—when the UN
called the organization’s founder, Danish collector Luise
Faurschou, and asked if there were any plans for art projects
during Climate Week. She told them about Breathe With Me.
“They said, ‘Why don’t you do it in our house too?’” Hein
recalled.

At the UN, the artist spent the Youth Action Summit and the
Climate Change Summit explaining his concept to people from all
over the world, many of whom didn’t speak English. Several heads of
state added their breath to the work, including the presidents of
Greece, Peru, and Bhutan, as well as former New York City mayor
Michael Bloomberg. Hein missed a photo op with French President
Emmanuel Macron, who stopped by while the artist was in the
bathroom.

Central Park has drawn a different crowd, including hundreds of
local children who’ve shared their breath thanks to a partnership
with the education department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Their contributions stand out, the lines starting lower on the
canvas due to the children’s height.

The museum’s director, Max Hollein, also took part. “Breathe
With Me was a moving experience, and a moment of both
relaxation and reflection,” he told artnet News. “Jeppe’s work is
inspirational, and invites participation and collective
awareness.”

Despite language barriers and cultural differences, Hein has
found the work to be universally relatable. “We’re all
breathing the same air,” he pointed out. Originally, he did not
conceive the work as related to climate change, although he
recognizes the link today.

He developed a practice of painting lines while focusing on
inhaling and exhaling a decade ago during a serious illness, as a
way of dealing with panic attacks. The participatory element came
later, when he started showing the line paintings in museums.

Hein also grew up on a bio-dynamic farm run by his parents, so
he’s always understood the importance of taking care of the earth.
“If you can’t breathe, you can’t live, the trees can’t live,” he
said. “It’s a very important thing.”

The artist plans to donate many of the individual canvases
from Central Park to the schools from the Met program. He would
have donated some to the UN, but red tape and concerns about
corruption led him to scrap that plan. Museums have already
expressed interest in showing that ten-panel UN work, and Hein
envisions visitors to the show breathing on the walls around the
canvases, expanding on the piece even further.

“Children, adults—anybody can share their breath,” Faurschou
told artnet News. “That’s really the power of the universal
language of art, to take something as fundamental as our breath,
that we all know, and link it to something as complicated and
complex as climate change.”

“Jeppe Hein: Breathe With Me” is on view in Central Park at
72nd Street and Center Road (between Sheep Meadow and the Naumburg
Bandshell) in New York, September 25–27, 2019, 11 a.m.–6 p.m. The
completed UN version is on view at the United Nations
Headquarters, New York, through September October 5, 2019.

“Jeppe Hein: I am With You” is on view at 303 Gallery, 555
West 21st Street, New York, September 12–October 19,
2019. 

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Hein’s Participatory Art Project United Schoolchildren and Heads of
State During Climate Week appeared first on artnet
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