In our third Excavation, Gabrielle Giattino returns for a conversation with Ellie Ga, an artist that she represents and whose video, Gyres, was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, a work that Holland Cotter writing in the New York Times described as “a truly extraordinary video triptych, [that] weaves together archaeology, oceanography and social justice by recording the recovery of ancient remains from the Aegean, the tidal drift of Japanese tsunami debris to the Greek islands and the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees to those same islands.”^[1]

Ellie was scheduled to screen the work here at Bryn Mawr in April 2020 for its Philadelphia premier.  Despite the cancellation, we are exploring ways in which to engage with Ellie in the year to come!  In anticipation, we present her video Sayed. 

Sayed is a part of Ellie’s Square Octagon Circle project which focuses on the historical and archaeological site of the light house of Alexandria. Throughout a wide range of artistic interventions that include research-based multimedia lecture-performances, videos, works on paper and a slideshow, Ga explores the limits of our ability to know the past- whether it persists in submerged ruins, remnants of texts or fragments of memories.

To view Sayed, click on https://vimeo.com/341584212
Password alexandria

Web Resources:

Bureau: http://www.bureau-inc.com/mainsite/Artists/Ellie/EllieGa.html

Ellie Ga: http://www.elliega.info

Guggenheim: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/33709

Whitney Museum of Art: https://whitney.org/watchandlisten/43443