Shirley Tse and Dana Berman Duff's Breathing Moons
The artist duo — who go by "Relational" — explore the unseen forces that bind us to the universe.
When sculptor Shirley Tse was invited by her former student Anna Hrund Másdóttir to produce an original exhibition at her cooperative gallery Kling and Bang in Reykjavik, her first thought was to invite her friend and former teacher, the film and video maker Dana Berman Duff, to collaborate with her.
Geography, landscape, desire and time are some of the interests these two artists shared. The result is an extraordinary manifestation of physical elements — breath, moon and tides — that bind us and the universe.
Working under the name “Relational,” Tse and Berman Duff's exhibition The Universe Breathes Us was first staged at Kling and Bang in 2025, and again this summer at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles. Both iterations included a live choral performance of an original song by Berman Duff and her husband, the composer-musician Alan Duff Berman. Seeing it for the first time, I was struck by the deceptive simplicity of each of the elements and the subtly seamless ways that they animate each other. In Tse’s photograph “Orkney Moon” (2025), a soccer ball covered in rice paper rests in a green summer field on a Scottish island. Reborn as a moon, it migrates into a series of sculptures that fill the main gallery, contained by projections of Duff’s videos on opposite walls. In “The Other Side of the Moon Is Not Dark” (2025), a giant moon slowly rotates, and in “The Breathing Ocean (Portal)” (2026), the moon meets a video of the original Icelandic choir fracturing into a kind of northern lights.
In an adjacent room, film and sculptural elements combine in the surprisingly moving installation Sun and Moon (2025). Suspended by thread from the gallery ceiling, Tse’s rice-paper moon casts changing shadows in the white light of Duff’s 16mm projector. The tail end of a big reel of film flaps incessantly.
I’ve followed and written about both Tse’s and Duff’s work for more than two decades. The Universe Breathes Us felt like a new and exciting departure. On August 4, we met at the gallery to talk about it. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
