Vanessa Damilola Macaulay: Artist Talk
@ International Museum of Surgical Science
1524 N Lake Shore Dr, Chicago, IL 60610
Opening Friday, August 15th, from 6PM - 8PM
Join us for a presentation by Vanessa Damilola Macaulay exploring her exhibit “Breathing Into the Race Machine”
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 Breathing Race into the Machine is not about outdated science; it is a powerful examination of how modern technologies continue to extract legibility from Black flesh while remaining fundamentally inadequate to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.
Official Website
More events on this date
Tags: Breathing Race into the Machine, Chicago, IMSS, International Museum of Surgical Science, Near North Side, Vanessa Damilola Macaulay
« previous event
next event »