Breathing Race into the Machine

By Vanessa Damilola Macaulay

June 27 - August 17, 2025

Opening Reception

June 27th, 6:00pm-8:00pm
Free with RSVP

Breathing Race into the Machine interrogates the racial logics encoded in medical instruments, not as corrupted deviations from a neutral standard but as systems deliberately engineered to encode inequality. Centering the spirometer, a device used to measure lung capacity, the exhibition reveals how this tool of clinical diagnosis doubled as a mechanism of racial classification. The spirometer, developed in the 19th century, helped forge and legitimise pseudoscientific claims that Black people had diminished lung capacity, reinforcing myths of biological inferiority. These claims were not discarded with time; they have been absorbed into contemporary medical protocols, algorithms, and diagnostic thresholds. The racial bias encoded in the spirometer persists, along with the ideology that justified it, as an enduring fiction that pathologises Black breath while disguising power as science.

In this exhibition, breath is not a symbol but a contested physiological threshold, a racialised site of measurement and control. For Black people, the reading of breath has long been made legible only to institutions of slavery and their afterlives in policing, medicine, environmental policy, education, and the carceral state, where the simple act of breathing remains a site of surveillance, suspicion, and control. Rather than repair or redeem the spirometer, Vanessa Damilola Macaulay unsettles its logic, reimagining its function and offering a new grammar for how breath is measured, heard, and understood. Through sculpture, sound, performance and archival excavation, she challenges the ways bodies are rendered measurable. Breathing Race into the Machine is not about outdated science; it is a powerful examination of how modern technologies continue to extract legibility from Black flesh while remaining fundamentally inadequate to comprehend the complexity of Black life in the US and beyond.

About the Artist:

Vanessa Damilola Macaulay, a Black British artist based in Chicago, works across performance, video, and photography to explore how creative strategies can centre Black life in ways that resist and reimagine systems of antiblackness. Each project takes a distinct form, shaped by embodied inquiry and social urgency. Macaulay’s work, grounded in Black feminist epistemologies and speculative modes of inquiry, challenges inherited narratives and constructs new visual and performative languages for imagining Black life beyond survival. Recent works include This Way Up with Care, a performance that examines the struggles associated with crossing borders, and The Architect, an immersive performance on a double-decker bus in London shown at the Greenwich & Docklands International Festival. Macaulay’s work has been featured in theatres, exhibitions and residencies across the UK, South Africa, Europe, and the U.S.

Learn More: https://www.vanessamacaulay.com/

This project is partially supported by a CityArts Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events.

The International Museum of Surgical Science acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.