“Breathing Through the Roaring 2020s: Fascism, Imperial Breathlessness, and the Art of Breathing Otherwise” with Ronak K. Kapadia

What does it mean to breathe through the Roaring 2020s? Moving between the first Roaring Twenties and our own moment, Ronak K. Kapadia listens beneath the spectacle of crisis to the injuries and forms of support that public life increasingly trains us not to notice. Drawing from his book in progress, Breathing in Common, he traces the afterlives of US war-making into atmosphere, bodily capacity, and the infrastructures that sustain breath. Close readings of queer Pakistani artist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Nigerian American photographer Mikael Owunna show how contemporary art can reorganize exposure itself: sheltering bodies from compulsory visibility, rebuilding the conditions under which Black queer life appears, and making breathable life available as a problem of form. 

Ronak K. Kapadia is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and curator whose work traces the aesthetic and material life of US empire and its violent afterlives, asking how minoritarian art makes those histories perceptible while creating other ways of sensing, knowing, and sustaining life. He is Associate Professor and Director of the Interdepartmental Graduate Concentration in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, with affiliations in Art History, Museum and Exhibition Studies, and Global Asian Studies.