The Space between Breaths

During the week of Art Basel Paris, the Mondriaan Fund and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in France present The Space between Breaths, a group exhibition curated by Julia Geerlings.  
 
Bringing together works by Annabelle Binnerts, Mandy Franca, Daniel Godínez-Nivón, Femke Herregraven, Fiona Lutjenhuis, Chaim van Luit, Mette Sterre, Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi, and Iriée Zamblé, the exhibition considers breath as a point of encounter between body and environment, individual experience and collective realities. The exhibition forms part of the Mondriaan Fund's commitment to presenting contemporary artists from the Netherlands within an international context and brings together a selection of established artists who recently received support through its Artist Basic Grant. 

Curatorial framework
Across her curatorial practice, Julia Geerlings explores how artistic practices make visible the social, political, and ecological conditions that shape everyday life. Through site-responsive and interdisciplinary exhibition-making, she creates frameworks in which contemporary art articulates forms of interconnectedness that transcend boundaries between the personal and collective, and the local and planetary. 

In The Space between Breaths, breath is approached not as a subject matter, but as a condition. At once intimate and shared, involuntary and essential, breath offers a way of thinking through interdependence. It connects bodies to atmospheres, environments, infrastructures, and to one another. As climate change, environmental degradation, migration, unequal access to care, and accelerating economic pressures continue to shape lived realities, the act of breathing becomes inseparable from the conditions that sustain, regulate, or restrict life.  

Geerlings: “Since becoming a parent, I have developed a growing interest in breathing. During pregnancy, I learned various breathing techniques through hypnobirthing to help manage contractions. After my children were born, I often listened to their breathing to tell whether they were sleeping peacefully or perhaps coming down with a cold. When my mother was dying a few years ago, I also became acutely aware of her breathing and the rattling sound that accompanied it, commonly known as the death rattle. 

While researching artists who had received the Artist Basic Grant, I noticed that several engage with breath in their work. Through different perspectives and artistic forms, they explore how breathing connects us to our bodies, our surroundings, and one another.” 

Artists
Working across installation, sculpture, sound, video, painting, textile, and performance, the participating artists investigate the forces that shape contemporary existence. Their practices engage questions of ecology, language, labor, technology, memory, care, and collective life, revealing how bodies remain entangled with broader social and environmental systems. 

Several works trace the ways political, economic, and ecological structures become embedded in bodily experience. In Labour Lung, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi explore breathing as a site where labor, exploitation, addiction, and technological control converge. Femke Herregraven's The Murmur of the Dying considers breath, sighs, and murmurs as forms of expression that exceed language, while Annabelle Binnerts investigates the material relationship between speech, words, and respiration. Elsewhere, wind currents, dreams, exhaustion, activism, and states of vulnerability become ways of understanding how individual lives are shaped through continuous exchange with the worlds they inhabit.  

Rather than presenting breath as self-evident, The Space between Breaths attends to the space between inhalation and exhalation in which dependency, coexistence, fragility, and possibility come momentarily into focus. 

Opening 
October 22, 2026, 6–9pm 

Exhibition 
October 22–25, 2026 

Venue 
Atelier Néerlandais 
22 Avenue Victoria 
75001 Paris 

Atelier Néerlandais is a platform of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in France dedicated to Dutch design, visual arts, and literature. Located in the heart of Paris, it facilitates cultural exchange and collaboration between Dutch and French creative professionals, organizations, and audiences. 

The Mondriaan Fund is the public fund for visual arts and cultural heritage in the Netherlands and the Caribbean part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Through grants, commissions, and international programmes, it supports artists, cultural practitioners, institutions, and projects, while fostering the visibility of contemporary artistic practices in an international context.