Yale School of Art
Friday, 23 January 2026
10:30am–12:00pm ET
16:30–18:30 CET

LINDA ZEB HANG
OBJECTIVE OXYGEN

This lecture performance forms part of an ongoing transnational project attuning ethics, labor, and intimacy in solo, collaborative, and collective art practice. Written across cities and shared studios—Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Detroit—the work maps the social and poetic infrastructures that sustain artists outside and inside institutional systems: the squat, the printshop, the garden, the table.

Each chapter—Objective Oxygen, Notes on Kin, Attuning the Dramaturgy, Scenes from the Otherground, Garden of Learning, and Irregular Rhythms of a Heartbeat—translates physical processes (printing, building, breathing) into an ethics of relation.

In Objective Oxygen, the act of not pulling a print becomes a metaphor for consent and restraint. Notes on Kin redefines lineage through the infrastructures of care that emerge after displacement. Attuning the Dramaturgy positions the squat as both method and pedagogy, linking the right to print, water, and build as parallel struggles for autonomy. Scenes from the Otherground maps informal networks of collaboration that keep cultural ecosystems alive. Garden of Learning merges ecological practice with abolitionist thinking, while Irregular Rhythms of a Heartbeat listens for the syncopated pulse of collective survival.

Together, these writings propose a language for artistic responsibility in dangerous times. They treat art-making as a breathing practice: rhythmic, relational, resistant—and position tenderness, attention, and refusal as materials equal to paper, metal, or ink.

Objective Oxygen was first recorded orally in the summer of 2025 while Linda was sustaining a critical back injury from exhibition-making in Amsterdam. In the fall of 2025, as part of the NewCrits artist scholarship New Identities for Dangerous Times, they worked with cohorts to recall, define, and protect its written structure. Founded in 2022 by New York-based artist, writer, and educator Ajay Kurian, NewCrits is a program created by artists for artists, democratizing access to arts education.

In December 2025, Linda was invited by Nontsikelelo Mutiti, artist, designer, educator, and Director of Graduate Studies (GD), to lecture at Yale School of Art. Objective Oxygen asks: Who else am I breathing with and for when I write, when I teach, when I make? This lecture performance gathers Linda’s principles, gestures, and installation notes guiding how they move through art, love, and community. Over the last year, this work has shifted from private reflection to coeval practice—a way of writing ethics into the architecture of daily life.