Woman Trying to Breathe Video
Duration: 2 minutes 14 seconds.
Year: 2018 Artist: Aarrti Zaveri

‘Woman Trying to Breathe’ has a woman protago- nist, which is played by the artist herself, sitting in an unidentified location and around her life moves on ‘as usual’. The life sustaining wind/air is no longer the ‘as usual’ thing. The future world wars are not just going to be for the control of Water but also for the control of Air. In countries like Japan, people have already started buying a few ‘whiffs of pure air’ and the human beings wearing oxygen masks, an image that has been around for some time, are going to be the ‘sig-nature’ of the future times. In this video the artist defines ‘Wind’ as ‘air/breath’. In Indian philosophy ‘air/breath’ is considered to be the vital component or elixir or ‘ojas’ that gives life to the beings. Once denied or polluted, air/breath could turn life into nil or hell. The artist gives the metaphor of ‘woman trying to breathe’ a double edge in order to underline the fact that in the war for air also the first victim to fall is a woman. Life without pure air is claustrophobic. This woman while breathing witnesses how the winds ‘change’ elsewhere in the world through the juxtaposition of various wind/air related images.