Lecturer
Department of History of Art, Bryn Mawr College

The Drug of Reminding: Tracing the Limits of Memory in the Archival Practice of Ellie Ga

This talk will focus on the artistic practice of Ellie Ga, a contemporary artist working across a variety of media that includes installation, photography, performance, sculpture and video. From her residency at the Explorer’s Club in New York where she developed a lecture that detailed the things that had disappeared from the club’s archive to her tenure as an artist in residence on an arctic naval expedition, Ga has developed a research and travel-intensive approach that integrates a wide range of narrative genres and visual strategies, from travelogue to documentary, photographs to video and slide installations. Focusing primarily on her most recent body of work, a sustained engagement with the archaeological ruins and archival sites of the Pharos of Alexandria, this talk will address the ways in which Ga’s practice interrogates the aesthetic, discursive, geographical and scientific systems of knowledge that sustain our constructions of personal and shared history.