How do you display something you can’t see? By showing its effects on the world around it: on creatures, on inanimate objects, by its environmental traces that can be heard and felt but not seen. “The Air We Share” at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden achieves a delightful balance capturing the evanescent mixture of oxygen and nitrous gas we rarely think of but cannot live without. It serves up a smorgasbord of thematic areas that deal with air as a medium through which we pass and a carrier of microscopic particles that, in turn, passes through us. It considers how we can bisect its varied composition and how it ever so slightly clouds our vision with the effects it has on our surroundings. It tackles our attempts at channeling the flow of molecules, whether in a temporary inflatable shelter or as cities designed for better circulation. Finally, air gives us the slip in its political aggregate and through its unruly disregard for nationalization. 

Technology plays a big role in our relationship with air. AI-powered designs to resolve the multiple dimensions of seasonal, local and global aspects of positioning ourselves within the Earth’s troposphere are but the newest attempt at applying tools to the singularity of our situation. Earth has no plural. If there is anything that should make us aware of this global existence it is the first ever image of the Blue Marble, taken from the air, by Apollo 17. 

The exhibition employs a number of sleights of hand to make us care for that which we normally cannot comprehend by bending it to our ocular predisposition. A curtain softly undulates in a doorway. Empty mason jars bear descriptive labels of their invisible contents. Perfumes of olfactory memories carry the signature of a place. Lightweight airducts are a backdrop for airborne diseases and the promise of a cleaner life in the comfort zone alike. But the most convincing contributor to this show is another invisible wave-particle, light. It masterfully enhances the subtle color gradient rising from floor to ceiling, like the rise of a charcoal sun that blurs our perception of where the atmosphere meets the solid ground on which we stand. 

tf.