EXHAUSTION

Exhaustion is a visual meditation on the double crisis that defined 2020, a year of racial and medical reckoning. The year was marked by breathlessness. The respiratory distress of COVID-19 caused nearly two million fatalities worldwide by the end of the pandemic’s first year. While confined to their homes during lockdown, millions watched the bodycam video of George Floyd struggling to breathe while handcuffed and pinned to the ground by police.

Created in 2022, the video titled Exhaustion is nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds long—the amount of time that former officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd, causing him to die of asphyxia. Floyd’s refrain, “I can’t breathe,” has become a mantra in the struggle against oppression.

Exhaustion was commissioned by Fondazione Prada for the Finite Rants series.