Ellie Ga

Conception and performance: Ellie Ga
 

Born in New York and based in London, in 2007 Ellie Ga set out on board the Tara, a schooner that carried out scientific missions in the Arctic. Drifting in the ice for a year, the Tara will remain stuck in the ice and permanent night for another five months.

Ellie Ga came back from this immobile voyage with a series of “lectures” whose starting point was daily life on board. She tells us, for example, how, in order to carry out simple tasks, they had to create an imaginary map of the pack ice, a place where the notion of time zones simply does not exist. Gradually, the logic of the situation was extended from the particular to the universal, questioning our way of being in the world. This singular work takes the form of a log book in which the artist’s bewitching voice blends with fixed images, videos and sound recordings. More than a record of an extreme experience, Ellie Ga offers viewers the experience of a dreamlike voyage.

With a pack of cards using images from her voyage in the Arctic, Ellie Ga brings out our relation to uncertainty. When the cards are drawn, visitors have a keen, personal sense of what it is like when their immediate future depends on meteorological conditions.