Artist Talk with Ellie Ga

ELLIE GA is a New York City born artist and writer. Her narrative-based videos and performances reflect a passion for multi-disciplinary knowledge exchange told through everyday conversations, poetic sidesteps and obsessive research. Her wide-ranging investigations address pressing social issues, often in unexpected contexts: from the submerged ruins of the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria (Square Octagon Circle) and the charting of the quotidian in the frozen Arctic Ocean (The Fortunetellers) to a study of messages in bottles, both as tools for studying oceans currents and as metaphor for exile (Strophe, A Turning; Gyres 1-3). In Quarries, stories of resistance are extracted from unlikely places and found on overlooked surfaces including the mysteries of prehistoric stone tools to the labor of stone masons who paved the streets of Lisbon.

Ga was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Previously, she was the recipient of a Swedish Research Council artistic research grant. Her work is in public collections including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; The Whitney Museum of American Art; Albright-Knox; The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College; FRAC Besançon; The Swedish Public Art Fund and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. She is the author of Square Octagon Circle and North Was Here. She is a recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film-Video.