Ephemeropteræ #6: Ellie Ga Astrida Neimanis Ursula Biemann

Ellie Ga’s work is inspired by the indeterminacy of exploration and the human desire to contact and chart the unknown. She uses a range of media to build her layered narratives. Over the past two years, she has been developing a history of messages in bottles: their use in oceanography, folklore, and literature. “The message in a bottle” is used as a portal into the circumstances that contribute to drift and how a person interprets what they find on the shoreline. Objects drift and human stories drift. Ga explores how flotsam on the shore engages one’s own humanity and becomes a vehicle for action.

Ursula Biemann’s “Subatlantic” is based on comprehensive research and engages with the far-reaching territorial and climatic transformations due to the extraction of resources, drawing attention to the social and biological micro-dynamics at work in these massive physical encroachments. Her recent fieldwork has taken her to the Arctic region. Engaging with the political ecology of oil, ice, and water, the artist interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, science fiction poetry, and academic findings to narrate a changing planetary reality. This world-making, “geomorphic” practice is no longer concerned with the distinction between images and the supposedly “real thing” represented. Instead, it explores how moving images form and change the way we grasp and attend to the world. Discussing her artistic practice in her recent video Subatlantic, Biemann raises questions regarding the entanglement of aesthetics, ecology, and speculative thought.