NORTH WAS HERE by Ellie Ga

$ 22.50 $ 25.00

Artists Book / Paperback / Smyth-sewn

ISBN 978-1-946433-14-5 / 112 pp, 5.125 x 7.5 in. 

offset printing, 3 duotone images, 16 full-color pages

cover: two-color letterpress; inside cover: full-color offset back cover

 

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.” 

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.