North Was Here

Ellie Ga

ART  |  $25 $22.50

November 2018
Read an excerpt

At the beginning north was here. But it keeps changing. That’s where we were. This is our world. We had a couple of trips outside of this map but not maybe more than four days altogether. These are pressure ridges. I tried to name them after things I know, like the national mountain of Norway. There is another one over there. And that one doesn’t have a name.

This is the area where the polar bears used to hang around. They hung around for a week. Around some hummocks. A hummock is a big pile of ice.

That’s Tartu. That’s Helsinki. Copenhagen is not here. It broke up when we were building the runway.

After a 2006 residency at the Explorers Club in New York, artist and writer Ellie Ga (born 1976) became the sole artist-in-residence aboard The Tara––a research vessel lodged in the ice of the Arctic Ocean, and the second boat in history built to drift indefinitely in pack ice, where it collected scientific data on Arctic ice conditions. From this extraordinary adventure arose Ga’s acclaimed performance lecture “The Fortunetellers,” which she has delivered at the Kitchen, the Guggenheim Museum and the New Museum, among other venues.

North Was Here is a book of four short projects related to Ga’s polar residency. It includes three arctic booklets made during the continuous polar night as the boat was drifting, as well as a new piece that juxtaposes Polaroids and documentary footage stills that the artist used for a related video piece, “At the Beginning North Was Here.”

About the Author

Ellie Ga is a New York-born, Stockholm-based, artist whose immersive, wide-ranging investigations include the classification of stains on city sidewalks to the charting of the quotidian in the frozen reaches of the Arctic Ocean. In performances, video-essays and installations, Ga’s braided narratives intertwine extensive research with first-hand experiences that often follow uncertain leads and take unexpected turns. She has exhibited and performed internationally at the New Museum, The Kitchen and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and in Paris at Fondation Cartier pour L’Art Contemporain, among many others. Her video work is in the public collections of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo; FRAC Franche-Comté, Besançon; Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris; Hannebauer Collection, Berlin and the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York. Ga was as a recent recipient of a three-year fellowship from the Swedish Research Council.

Praise

Ellie Ga picks apart the world, inventing for herself its own heart. She maps out her own metropolises and confronts their arcades. She gives arbitrary yet clearly meaningful names like Paris and Leningrad to landmarks such as pressure ridges. She names one such landmark Chaos, and it disappears. She introduces taxonomies for herself. Her drift is a far greater surrender of autonomy than any wandering parisian who considers himself to be an assimilated part of the urban environment. The traditional flâneur of Baudrillard and Benjamin is specific to his place; the (non-)place(s) Ellie Ga drifts through are far more tricky to define.

Katherine Beaman

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946433-14-5
Trade Paperback
Smyth-sewn. 112 pp, 5.125 x 7.5 in
Publication Date: November 20 2018
Distribution: Artbook | D.A.P, Asterism Books (US)