Baby’s Breath is a body of work centred on a fictional band of the same name. It unfolds through research into subcultures associated with punk and grunge underground scenes in Greece and the Netherlands, understood as spaces that have, at times, enabled the inclusion of femme and queer people and safeguarded moments of hope, expression and affection.
Baby’s Breath performs the idea of the band, inhabiting the dreamscape of a teenage fantasy: to be in a band. It brings to the fore the intangible creativity and drive for escape associated with adolescence, allowing different audiences to find resonance in its affirming urgency.
The band takes form through four ambiguous punk-princess characters: the Princess of Spring, the Princess of the Night, the Princess of the Ocean and the Princess of Rainbow. Through the band as a medium, performative qualities and visual elements, including girlish stereotypes and mythical archetypes, materialise as physical forms whose stage presence is deliberately disobedient, testing the limits of conventional exhibition spaces and formats.
Taking shape through sonic and visual embodiments, an album and live sets, Baby’s Breath becomes a parable for carrying collective and political tensions through everyday life. As a cross-disciplinary project, the band becomes both a safe haven for simple yet profound moments in queer lives, such as a first kiss in the street, and a means of expressing the urgency of queer ecstasies.
Image in reference, Baby’s Breath, Anna Maria Pinaka, 2026
Anna Maria Pinaka works across painting, video, performance and writing. Drawing on girlhood, child-ness, queer femme imagery and auto-fiction, her practice weaves together semantics that seek to canonise and regulate with dreamscapes that subvert symbols commonly dismissed as juvenile. Her first solo exhibition, stay with me, I’ll give you jewls (2023), was curated by Ioanna Gerakidi at opbo studio in Piraeus. In 2025, her exhibition She Keeps Them Warm With Her Skirt at ROZENSTRAAT – a rose is a rose is a rose in Amsterdam, curated by Angeliki Tzortzakaki and Madelon van Schie, investigated the figure of the ‘princess’ as a complex feminine icon and a product of white, imperial Europe. The exhibition problematised the immaculate subject, transforming her into an all-encompassing and contradictory one. Pinaka received a practice-led PhD from the University of Roehampton in 2017, where her research explored methodologies addressing value and excess. Her writing has appeared in academic and art publications including I Confess!: Constructing the Sexual Self in the Internet Age (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019) and Kathy Acker, 1971–1974 (Éditions Ismael, 2019). In 2023, she co-edited Museum-ing: Research in Practice for the Stedelijk Studies Journal. Her monograph Porno-graphing: What do ‘dirty’ sexual subjectivities do to art? was published by Onomatopee, Eindhoven, in 2017. In 2026, she was selected as an ARTWORKS Grantee.