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The airway can be a reference to both air travel and human breathing, but it is also the name of a dog. The Airway homage has its starting point in a 1920s photograph depicting the dog Airway, who was part pet, part laboratory animal for two anesthesiologists. His airway experiments led to the development of a device that serves to open a patient’s airway. The invention became known as the Guedel Airway, after the doctor and the dog involved. The work also takes its starting point from a sculpture created by Friedrich Wilhelm Wolff in 1847: a satirical bronze sculpture depicting Germany’s first experiment with anesthesia, performed on an old blind bear at the Berlin Zoo. At the center of the sculpture, we see the bear surrounded by several animals. Dressed in human clothing, the animals have characteristics that point to the various doctors involved in the experiment. These characters are placed in a tale that takes place in two worlds simultaneously: The Garden and The Plot. We witness two virtual scenarios with a confusing relationship to reality – and to each other.

The unifying figure of the work is Broken Face, a hybrid between a sculpture and a petrified console game character: the so-called ‘non-playable character’. Animals rarely carry the history of the world on their shoulders, but this work brings to light some of the neglected stories and posits historical material in a contemporary setting. Likewise, these stories have been transformed into images that assume a distinct autonomy. Two important aspects of the film concern the quality of the imagery and the focus on breathing and respiration evident in its soundtrack. Building on this starting point, Gjerding questions how we perceive the world through the images we produce and surround ourselves with. The homage to the airways is about the status of images and how we live in and recode existing images.

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While ‘airway’ can be a reference to air travel and human breathing, in this context ‘airway’ is the name of a dog. The homage to Airway takes its starting point from a photograph from the 1920s depicting the dog Airway, who was part pet, part laboratory animal for two anesthesiologists. His airway experiments led to the development of a device that serves to open a patient’s airway. The invention became known as the Guedel Airway, after the doctor and the dog involved.

The work also takes its starting point from a sculpture created by Friedrich Wilhelm Wolff in 1847: a satirical bronze sculpture depicting Germany’s first experiment with anesthesia, performed on an old blind bear at the Berlin Zoo. At the center of the sculpture, we see the bear surrounded by several animals. Dressed in human clothing, the animals have characteristics that point to the various doctors involved in the experiment.

These characters are placed in a tale that takes place in two worlds simultaneously: The Garden and The Plot. We witness two virtual scenarios with a confusing relationship to reality – and to each other. The unifying figure of the work is Broken Face, a hybrid between a sculpture and a petrified console game character: the so-called ‘non-playable character’.

Animals rarely carry the history of the world on their shoulders, but this work brings to light some of the neglected stories and posits historical material in a contemporary setting. Likewise, these stories have been transformed into images that assume a distinct autonomy. Two important aspects of the film concern the quality of the imagery and the focus on breathing and respiration evident in its soundtrack. Building on this starting point, Gjerding questions how we perceive the world through the images we produce and surround ourselves with. The homage to Airway is about the status of images and how we live in and recode existing images.