Hold Your Breath was commissioned by UTS Gallery for The Fall Before Fall – a two-person exhibition with Elvis Richardson which contemplated the destruction of the World Trade Centre a decade after the event. Conceived as a ‘memento mori’ (a reminder of death), the work considered the cultural and social processes that animate our understanding of 9/11.
“Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s work is exemplary. He extracts from the iconic photograph an image of another world. Our world. Our world conjoined with the worlds of the perhaps two hundred people who fell or jumped (who can say) from the towers that day. His floating figures – them, and us – are held in an impossible space between a void and a vortex, between the open empty sky streaked with cloud that only emphasises its boundlessness, and the sucking twisters that swallow all in their path only to spit it out in unrecognizable form - that is, as precisely formless; abject. Between them he opens an instant in which we can only hold our breath, suspended in the space of anticipation, momentarily displaced, like the breath displaced from the lungs of the winded, falling bodies and captured, precariously, in Cunningham’s wonderful, hopeful, balloons. We are all falling, all the time, he seems to say, and the balloons are a form of essential, indispensable denial in going on being even in the process of falling.”
- Anna Gibbs
Hold Your Breath, 2011
HD three-channel digital animation with sound, 16:9, 5:00 min
Animation: Wendy Chandler
Sound: Heath Franco
Edition of 5 + 1 AP
“Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s work is exemplary. He extracts from the iconic photograph an image of another world. Our world. Our world conjoined with the worlds of the perhaps two hundred people who fell or jumped (who can say) from the towers that day. His floating figures – them, and us – are held in an impossible space between a void and a vortex, between the open empty sky streaked with cloud that only emphasises its boundlessness, and the sucking twisters that swallow all in their path only to spit it out in unrecognizable form - that is, as precisely formless; abject. Between them he opens an instant in which we can only hold our breath, suspended in the space of anticipation, momentarily displaced, like the breath displaced from the lungs of the winded, falling bodies and captured, precariously, in Cunningham’s wonderful, hopeful, balloons. We are all falling, all the time, he seems to say, and the balloons are a form of essential, indispensable denial in going on being even in the process of falling.”
- Anna Gibbs
Hold Your Breath, 2011
HD three-channel digital animation with sound, 16:9, 5:00 min
Animation: Wendy Chandler
Sound: Heath Franco
Edition of 5 + 1 AP
