ARTISTS

Ohan Breiding

Guest Curatorial Program (2025)

Phantom Sun

Ohan Breiding is a Swiss artist and filmmaker based in New York. Through
photography, photographic and filmic archives, video and collaboration they employ a
trans-feminist lens to the discussion of ecological care by amplifying landscapes as
witness. Most recently, their work has been exhibited at MASS MoCA, Arts and Letters,
Hesse Flatow, Oceanside Museum (Getty PST), FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Kunsthaus
Zürich, IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film
Archive. Breiding is a 2026 Light Work Artist-in-Residence, a 2025–2026 Sharpe-
Walentas Artist-in-Residence and has previously held residencies at the Fire Island
Artist Residency (FIAR), Triangle Arts, TBA21–Academy Ocean Space, LMCC on
Governors Island, the Millay Colony, and Shandaken: Storm King. Their practice has
been featured in Art in America, Artforum, BOMB, e-flux, Frieze, Hyperallergic, The
Funambulist, Triple Canopy and Whitewall. Breiding is an Associate Professor in the Art
Department at Williams College and is represented by Ochi Gallery, Los Angeles.

In Phantom Sun, Breiding, an interdisciplinary artist who employs photography, video, as well as
archives to examine ecological care, pulls from the “killed negatives,” a trove ofrejected photographs
once belonging to the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the government agency established in the
mid-1930’s to provide aid to farmers during the Great Depression. These photographic negatives
were hole punched, marking them as unprintable, often forfailing to reinforce the public narrative
shaped by the FSA and by Roy Stryker, Chief of its Historical Section.

Breiding revives these discarded negatives to give them new agency. By reanimating these
fragmented views of the Great Depression, the artistreframes the New Deal’s vision of American
farm life against today’s political climate. A combination of archival images and newly produced
works, the installation overlays past and present histories of ecological precarity and resilience,
exploring ways of caring forthe land and its memory in the American context.

The project unfolds as a material meditation on a government information campaign,revealing how
both its subject (rural dwellers) and its medium (photography) depend on naturalresources and
processes of extraction. Shifting the focus from the human to the nonhuman, from the social to the
environmental, Breiding juxtaposes a selection of day-to-day images of terrains and agrarian
activities with recent photograms, collages on aluminum, still lifes on silver gelatin and inkjet prints,
and candle drips–the artist’s own experiments with light, minerals, and animal-derived products,
three essential elements in the making of photography. The result is a capacious sculpturalriff on the
landscape tradition: a post-nature, post-industrial tableau in which the narrative of crisis extends to
the land, and the nostalgia for pastoral America dissolves into the uncanny.

Conceived in dialogue with curator Mathilde Walker-Billaud, Phantom Sun deploys the motif of the
black hole–floating surreally and threateningly overthe photographs–to confront the failures of the
public archive, while annotating and expanding the genre of social and environmental documentary
photography that the FSA photographers (1) were instrumental in establishing.