Los Angeles premier of Nina Sarnelle’s film Breath Work, featured as a part of HOWL.

Breath Work is an experimental opera that explores air as a medium for resistance. Part documentary, part performative ritual, it takes place in Long Beach, California—an area filled with oil production and one of the largest ports in the world, where 25% of all imported goods enter the USA. This convergence of shipping infrastructure, railyards, freeways and oil refineries provides a visual backdrop for scenes of solidarity and grief staged by a cast and crew of 13 untrained local community members aged 11-65. Breath Work weaves together their creativity and their voices with personal stories of respiratory disease and environmental racism. This project was created in collaboration with Long Beach Forward, and funded by the California Arts Council.

HOWL brings together more than a dozen artists and collectives working collaboratively to resist the forces of anti-trans silencing, intimidation, and erasure for a 7-day exhibition, a series of workshops, discussions, a howling experimental film premiere, and a night of defiant performances to help us remember - and amplify - our power. See h-r.la for more details about the entire program.

Nina Sarnelle (they/them) makes research projects, participatory performances, music composition, video, and many experiments in pedagogy and collectivity. They facilitate somatic, improvisational & vocal workshops, including many with Selwa Sweidan under the collaborative project Touch Praxis. Their work explores conditions of neocolonialism, environmental injustice and labor exploitation in strange and intimate ways, often rooted in specific sites like the Port of LA, a former Nike Missile silo turned into a basketball court, or the shifting sands of “Silicon Beach.”

Sarnelle was recently awarded a fellowship from the California Arts Council, a fellowship at Metabolic Studio, and a NYFA Environmental Arts Grant. In 2020, they had a solo video exhibition at the New Museum. Their work has been shown at Whitechapel Gallery (London), Hammer Museum (LA), Getty Center (LA), Ballroom Marfa (TX), MoMA (NY), Istanbul Modern (Turkey), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology (Lisbon), Fundacion PROA (Buenos Aires), Black Cube (Denver), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Recess (NY), UNSW Galleries (Sydney), Project 88 (Mumbai), Kevin Space (Vienna), Villa Croce Contemporary Art Museum (Genova), Mwoods (Beijing), and others; and featured in Art Forum, Frieze, Art in America, Huffington Post, SFMoMA, Creators Project, FlashArt and more.