Online Screening: ‘How Much Air Lungs Can Hold’ by Isabel Barfod

16 May-26 May 2025

Overview

We are excited to share ‘How Much Air Lungs Can Hold’ by Isabel Barfod online for ten days from 16 May to 26 May 2025. This special screening coincides with Barfod’s solo exhibition currently on view at LUX until 8 June 2025, presented in collaboration with LUX Scotland.

Register here to access the online screening of ‘How Much Air Lungs Can Hold’.

In this profound meditation on Black aquatic experiences, Barfod weaves experimental animation with intimate conversations with Black swimmers from Glasgow and London. The film’s sonic architecture creates eleven narrative threads that flow between personal revelation and collective memory, enmeshed with the hypnotic sound design by Shamica Ruddock.

Through these gathered voices, Barfod examines water as both a space of transcendence and a contested space, where moments of aquatic freedom emerge through community support yet often remain precluded by colonial legacies and systemic exclusion in the UK. Her abstract imagery emerges through a synthesis of CGI, traditional 2D animation, and underwater footage, acting as both witness and interpreter of the spoken words.

The exhibition opens a space where interiority, rememory, non-linearity, entanglement, and submergence converge, dissolving boundaries between embodied experience and collective memory. Through this immersive experience, Barfod surfaces speculative arrangements for Black social life, alongside dialectics of light:dark, presence:absence, legibility:opacity, and surface:depth. The work imagines the possibilities of embodiment, asking questions about our capacity to hold, listen, sense, and what it means to bear witness.

Artist biography:
Isabel Barfod is an animator and artist based in Glasgow. Working across digital, hand-drawn, 2D and 3D animation, her work is driven by irritation and speculation, looking to process agitations through drawing, scratching and mark making.

Her practice seeks to draw out the ‘hard-to-describe’ micro/experiences, feelings and phenomena associated with moving in and out of private/public space as a Black Queer person. Cloaking figures and gestures in abstraction, she evokes absurd, surreal and racialised social realities residing within the ephemeral encounter. As a means of working through her own uncertainty and frustrations, she images reparative and restitutive possibilities that are collectively-imagined and speculated.

Previous screenings, grants and commissions include: Margaret Tait Commission (2023/24), Edinburgh Film Festival (2023), In Motion Festival London & Rotterdam (2023), Flamin’ Animations Commission with Film London (2022/23), London International Animation Festival, Barbican, London (2022), Tramway TV (2022), Africa in Motion Film Festival (2019).

Accessibility Information: 
Auditory/Visual Access
We have hearing loops, a large print guide and magnifying glasses available in the space. The screenings with captions and audio descriptions will be available daily.

Sensory Note
The film contains some flashing images throughout.
 
Content Note
References to structural racism throughout.
Discussion of suicide at 48 minutes for 2 minutes.
 
 

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