Four Thousand Blocks

Ellie Ga, Projection Harbor, 2013

The artist Ellie Ga has created works out of her experiences in the North Pole and more recently off the coast of Alexandria, at the site of the underwater excavation of the famous Pharos Lighthouse--one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. She's interested in facts and information. She recycles information and makes art out of it. As part of her recent show at Bureau, Four Thousand Blocks, she created, for example, a letter press print of a dialogue between the King of Egypt and the god Thoth about the pros and cons of the gifts the god is contemplating giving to humankind. Thoth says, “ I can’t think of anything bad to say about writing. It will make humans wiser and improve their memories. The recipe for memory has been discovered.” In this case the king appears to be wiser than his divinely inspired counterpart when he responds, “What you have discovered is not a recipe for memory, but the drug of reminding. With your invention they will be taught, but they will not be wiser.” It’s nice know that even the ancients were worried that technological advances could result in the attrition of certain human faculties—as we do today in considering how certain kinds of thinking have become the province of the computer. The show was composed of a three channel video related to the artist’s experience of the Pharos excavation which also involved underwater dives. One screen is primarily a dark room in which images are developing. A central screen is a documentary involving the process by which the artist gained information about the excavation and the third is simply compartments filled with metallic type out of which Ga picks letters to create a story. It’s explained that a good type setter can decipher the sentence that is being created by simply watching the movement of hands between these compartments. Synchronicity might be one word to describe what Ellie Ga is attempting. Big data is another, but the net result is to winnow and exhibit the affect of historical enormity on the human imagination.

Walking Drifting Dragging

Log of Limits (Snow Walks) by Ellie Ga

It is becoming increasingly hard to feel a sense of place in our current globalized world. Wherever you are, you're instantly connected to everywhere else you have ever been and there is both a consoling and frustrating familiarity to the world. The internet is everywhere along with KFC, McDonald’s and a host of spinoffs that infect even the most third world of third world countries. OK Pyongyang might be the exception. The discipline of psychogeography and the work of writers like W.G. Sebald and Will Self  devoted as they are to unfolding the historical connections and memories which create a sense of uniqueness in place is a countervailing movement in our culture. The Walking Drifting Dragging show  recently exhibited at the New Museum explored this tendency in visual media. Four artists  defined boundaries within specific terrains: The New Yorker, Ellie Ga, dealt with the Arctic, Eunji Cho from Seoul studied crossing points in Berlin, Paulo Nazareth’s (Belo Horizonte, Brazil) worn down sandals attested to his trek from Brazil to New York City and Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sonal Jain of Desire Machine Collective (Guwahati, India) used video and a hand drawn map to trace out river pathways between Northern India and Bangladesh. The show was part of the Museum as Hub project, devoted to themes of internationalism in art and while most museums play lip service to indigenous culture, Walking Drifting Dragging had the curious effect of making the viewer stop in his tracks long enough to recognize that he or she might be creating their own path, right there and then.