Take a Breath
Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA)

Group Exhibition Featuring Alex Cecchetti’s Underwater Installation “The Journey of One Breath”
14 June 2024 – 17 March 2025
Dublin, Ireland

From 14 June 2024 to 17 March 2025, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin presents Take a Breath, a major exhibition that offers a historical, social, political, and personal examination of breathing — why we breathe, how we breathe, and what we breathe. The show features works by international artists including Marina Abramović, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ana Mendieta, Isabel Nolan, and Alex Cecchetti, among many others, alongside a programme of performances and sound pieces. Take a Breath encourages reflection on air, breath, and the interconnections between bodies, environments, and histories. IMMA

Alex Cecchetti’s contribution to Take a Breath is an immersive installation titled “The Journey of One Breath”, which evokes his underwater explorations and the poetics of breath and immersion. Installed in Gallery 2 of IMMA, Cecchetti’s work unfolds as a fluid environment composed of hand-dyed cotton and silk hammocks in indigo and ocean blues, created with natural dyes and traditional techniques, where viewers are welcomed into spaces that reference water, currents, and suspended states of being. IMMA

Within this atmospheric setting, fluid architectures of hanging textiles form corridors and chamber-like spaces that echo the shapes and movements of ocean waves. These textile forms, shaped by natural dyeing and ecological processes, create a backdrop for video projections of freediving and undersea encounters interwoven with a song written by Cecchetti that draws on the sonic qualities of breath and water. IMMA

Central to Cecchetti’s piece are the “medusa mother” hammocks, crafted from cotton and silk, where participants are invited to rest, breathe, and enter into a multisensory dialogue with the work. Within the installation’s blue-toned space — where walls and windows are treated in deep pigment — the projected video diaries of submerged environments intertwine with recordings of two operatic vocalists performing a musical composition by the artist, creating an immersive interplay of colour, movement, sound, and breath. studiointernational.com

Take a Breath situates Cecchetti’s underwater installation within an exhibition that explores ecology, culture, politics, meditation, and resistance through breath as both a physical act and symbolic gesture. The work stands in dialogue with other installations and performances in the show that consider the act of breathing as a fundamental human condition and as a site of social and environmental meaning. IMMA

As part of IMMA’s broader programme, Take a Breath includes public talks, guided tours, and performance events that deepen engagement with the exhibition’s themes and invite audiences to consider breath as a shared and contested space across disciplines and histories. IMMA