2/24/2023 0 Comments Ellie stuck in the middle![]() ![]() Her talk included photographs of the Arctic that failed to develop. Imagine the ‘whale’s eyeball’, whose label listed its donor and date, though the eyeball itself was long gone. There, she developed a lecture, The Catalogue of the Lost (and other Revelations) (2007), detailing the club’s archive and discovering what had disappeared: missing names, places, files and specimens. An early book, The Classifications of a Spit Stain (2000), charted various marks on streets and sidewalks, and she served as artist-in-residence at the Explorer’s Club in New York (think grand, 19th-century expeditions in pursuit of science and full of hubris). Ga has long been interested in archiving. Who needs to remember something when you can write it down? Thoth created writing, which he called ‘the gift of memory’, but the king (Plato tells us in writing) declares it to be the gift of forgetting. The text she’s setting will ultimately be about the nature of writing. She sets the type the middle screen goes dark, and she discusses typesetting’s history. In the middle, her hands shuffle transparencies, layering images: boats with eyes, Egyptian political posters emblazoned with apples or basketballs, and the hand gestures she uses whilst diving at the lighthouse ruins. ![]() ![]() On one screen, she arranges movable letterpress type another shows a darkroom. ‘If you want to remember something,’ Ga says, ‘don’t write it down.’ Ga discovers that alchemists prefer to pass on knowledge orally. The Greeks fused Thoth with Hermes, and this hybrid god gave birth to alchemy. For the series ‘Square Octagon Circle’ (2012–14) she created Eureka, A Lighthouse Play (2014) and the three-channel video installation Four Thousand Blocks (2013–14), following her search for the Pharos lighthouse in Alexandria through to Thoth, the Egyptian god of calendars, numbers and writing. With each project Ga generates research, notes, reports, performances and video pieces plumbing her ideas. She delves into memory, myth, language and history, in the Montaignian sense of essayer – to try, to explore. Ellie Ga’s essays – which manifest as performances and installations – guide you on expeditions to the Arctic or through Egypt searching for the first lighthouse. Not just in writing but in art too, and a writer could be jealous of how artists have taken to the form. All images courtesy the artist and Bureau, New York Four Thousand Blocks, 2013–14, video still. ![]()
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