TB Relief Artist Series: Collaboration Beyond Borders

Written by Katie Robertson - Public Relations Account Executive

Combatting a global health challenge like tuberculosis (TB), the world's deadliest infectious disease, is not a task that can be accomplished alone. Over the decades, many efforts have shown success in chipping away at the global burden of this devastating infection, and those that have made the biggest impact have often come from many parties working together across borders.

One recent push toward raising awareness of the urgency surrounding the fight against TB is a video artwork titled, “Breathe In.” This visual representation was created by Paulina Siniatkina in collaboration with her husband Johannes Hogebrink. Siniatkina is an artist, activist and TB survivor, who works to break down the taboo surrounding TB and revitalize its presence in mainstream conversation. Her work invites

viewers to contemplate our shared vulnerability and humanity, and it presents a compelling example of collaboration in motion against TB.

The World Comes Together

The process of creating “Breathe In” started in Bali during a dinner event at the Union World Conference on Lung Health 2024. Siniatkina had traveled to the show from her home in Amsterdam and met up with Dr. Jacob Creswell of the Stop TB Partnership, an international organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, dedicated to eliminating TB. At the Partnership, Dr. Creswell heads up TB REACH, an initiative connecting high-burden communities with new tools and approaches to more effectively and rapidly find people with TB and get them the care they need. The two had previously collaborated over email, with Creswell donating radiographs for Siniatkina to use in sculptures, prints and paintings.

Their discussion caught the attention of fellow dinner attendee, Dr. Robyn Waite, a global health and international development practitioner based in Canada who had recently started working with MinXray. The connection to TB awareness, a cornerstone of MinXray’s global health services, and the use of X-ray images to create impactful art piqued Waite’s interest and inspired her to inquire about the possibility of working together on an art piece using digital chest X-rays taken with MinXray radiography systems. Soon, an agreement was in place to collaborate on Siniatkina’s next work.

Connecting Communities

With this natural partnership in place, the next step was to collect the materials needed to put together the piece. Creswell invited Waite and Siniatkina  to join a planned TB REACH trip to Yola, a rural region of Nigeria, to perform community health screenings for TB and other conditions with the Janna Health Foundation (JHF) team, which would be using the IMPACT Wireless System.

Unfortunately, due to visa constraints, a regular barrier faced by people affected by TB, Siniatkina was unable to make the trip. Waite worked thoroughly to be her eyes and voice during the trip, creating a series of video and photo assets to help inform Siniatkina’s work. Throughout the trip, which included several stops in communities across the Yola region, hundreds of diagnostic images were captured to screen residents for TB and other lung and heart conditions. “Breathe In” incorporates 64 of these images into a video, editing them together to appear as one set of lungs breathing in and out.

In order to create the artwork in a way that accurately represented the experiences of the individuals involved, Siniatkina needed to deepen her understanding of local realities. She conducted interviews with Sunny John kwaghe, an X-ray technician from the area working with JHF, and Abdul, a nomadic man and community leader who supported Waite with translation during interviews when she was in Nigeria. Both expressed gratitude over what this technology could mean for their communities. The nomadic people having their chest X-rays taken were reportedly equally excited to be screened with the IMPACT System, a reaction that can be hard to find given the perceptions surrounding TB. Despite the taboo, these communities were interested in the equipment and activity and understood that willingly participating in screenings for early detection can have a significant impact on the health of those around them, another example of collective cooperation for the greater good.

Making a Masterpiece

Even the work itself is a testament to collaboration. Video is not normally a medium Siniatkina works in, though she felt it was the best way to represent the message of the piece. To translate her vision, she worked with her husband, Johannes Hogebrink, utilizing his expertise in digital media to bring the piece to life.

As “Breathe In” is set to debut at the 2025 Union Conference in November, a fitting full-circle finale to this story, Siniatkina hopes it can inspire the world to identify with those threatened by the presence of TB and come together to defeat it. We are all joined by our collective vulnerability to this disease. Whether we live in a high-burden country or not, bacteria do not care and will continue to cause infection around the world until we do something to stop it.

Luckily, the same oneness that makes us all vulnerable to TB is also our greatest weapon against it. If the cooperative spirit that enabled “Breathe In” can be adopted by the manufacturers, doctors, activists, governments, funding bodies and even individuals around the world with the power to intervene, we can stop TB.