A POTENTIALITY (2020, digital, 16mm film, 16 minutes)
Winner of the Alice Guy Prize Special Mention at FID Marseille 2020. Notes from the Jury: A film which meticulously reflects upon the materiality of time following specific histories. While focusing on details, the images prevent us from accessing the whole. This gesture reflects the subject where voice has been violently stripped from the people, left silenced. The Special Mention for Prix Alice Guy goes to “A POTENTIALITY” by Dana Berman Duff.
A POTENTIALITY is a continuation of my interest in using film to shoot printed material, as in the Catalogue series. I'm especially interested in the equivalence of the film grain to the halftone print dot at the base level of the construction of reproduced image and language.
This piece is built on a graphic project by Susan Silton in which she reprinted five pages of the New York Times from the 1930s. Her project has a disturbing resemblance to present day newspaper reports.
Opera "The Emperor of Atlantis" composed in 1944 by Viktor Ulmann, libretto by Peter Kien.
2-MINUTE TRAILER
The Universe Breathes Us
by Relational (Shirley Tse and Dana Berman Duff )
at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
July 26–September 3, 2026
song by Alan Duff Berman and Dana Berman Duff performed by C3LA (Choral Collective Los Angeles), and recorded on video by singers from Reykjavik led by Thomas Stankiewicz
The Universe Breathes Us is an artists’ collaboration that takes tidal turbine energy as a model that reveals a physical truth: forces originate from the relations of things, not from things themselves. The artists are drawn to the poetics of ocean tides as a manifestation of the gravitational forces between the Sun, Earth and Moon, forces which can be used as a source of collectable energy. The artists connect this energy model to human body breathing, where air moves by pressure differentials or its relative density:
It is important to note that in spite of how it feels when you inhale, you do not actually pull air into the body. On the contrary, air is pushed into the body by the atmospheric pressure that always surrounds you. This means that the actual force that gets air into the lungs is outside of the body. The energy expended in breathing produces a shape change that lowers the pressure in the chest cavity and permits the air to be pushed into the body by the weight of the planet's atmosphere. In other words, you create the space, and the universe fills it.
—From Yoga Anatomy, Leslie Kaminoff and Amy Matthews
The relation between tides and breathing is well established in physiology, as the term “tidal volume” refers to the amount of air that moves in or out of the lungs with each respiratory cycle.
The moon is an important motif in this exhibition, reflecting the relational tension of its colossal mass to the earth’s tides, of light and dark, of day and night, of ocean waves rising and falling. By highlighting the intangible connection between things, this exhibition counters the concept of isolated individuals who are discrete and separate from other living beings.
Walkthrough video:
Entry: Orkney Moon, 2025, mounted Giclée print, 30 x 40 inches
The Universe Breathes Us, Alan Duff Berman and Dana Berman Duff, 2025, song performed live at the opening reception by Contemporary Choral Collective Los Angeles.
Main Gallery:
Blue Bobbing Moon, 2025, plastic screen/aluminum rods/locally available stone, 56 x 52 x 53 inches
Yellow Bobbing Moon, 2025, plastic screen/fiberglass rods/locally available stone, 29 x 27 x 26 inches
Metal Bobbing Moon, 2025, metal screen/aluminum rods/locally available stone, 47 x 44 x 39 inches
Gold Bobbing Moon, 2025, plastic screen/aluminum rods/locally available stone, 47 x 42 x 45 inches
Silver Bobbing Moon, 2025, plastic screen/aluminum rods/ locally available stone, 61 x 54 x 58 inches
West wall projection: The Other Side of the Moon Is Not Dark, 2025, digital video, 2hr37mins. Full rotation of the moon from the Sun’s POV. Scaled from full Moon size to the size of the wall, the 29 days of the Moon’s rotation was scaled by the same percentage, which equals 2 hours and 37 minutes to rotate 360˚, resulting in movement that is just barely visible.
East wall projection: The Breathing Ocean (Portal), 2026, digital video, 8.5 minutes. Video of “The Universe Breathes Us” sung by an Icelandic choir (directed by Thomas Stankiewicz), with audio of sea waves, underwater energy collection turbines, and additional music by Alan Duff Berman.
On hallway video monitor: Orkney Moon, Shirley Tse, 2024, digital video, 10:49 mins. Produced at the Linkshouse Residency in Orkney, Scotland.
Small Gallery:
Sun and Moon, 2025, 16mm projector/16mm film/ rice paper/ tape/ found modeling paste/ repurposed brown paper/ Orkney grass and soil/ boy’s kicking marks.
Video on east wall including a recording of the song The Universe Breathes Us (by Alan Duff Berman and Dana Berman Duff, 2025) performed at the opening of the exhibition in Reykjavik, Iceland 2025. Conductor: Thomas Stankiewicz. Singers: Arna Mjöll, Arvid Ísleifur, Breki Sigurðarson, Dagný Guðmundsdóttir, Dagur Bjarnason, Helga Guðný Hallsdóttir, Júlíus Máni Sigurðsson og Sigríður Þorsteinsdóttir
The Universe Breathes Us
1.
When the space is open,
When the pressure drops low,
The atmosphere enters,
And the air pushes through.
The force that transports it
From the world to the lungs
is outside the body,
Not within.
[Chorus]
When the space is open,
The universe fills it.
When the body’s ready,
The universe fills it.
When the self is empty,
The universe fills it.
2.
Surrounding your body,
the atmosphere sings.
When pressure is true,
the air will flow through.
It's the breath that breathes me—
Inside and out:
I'm part of it all, all along.
[Chorus]
[Audible breathing for 30 seconds]