Ellie Ga: Quarries Condo Mexico City 2024

Ellie Ga, Quarries, HD video, sound, 40:23, Edition of 5 plus II AP

Bureau is pleased to participate in Condo Mexico City 2024. For this edition, we are happy to be hosted by Labor, where we will present a video work by Lisbon-based artist, Ellie Ga, Quarries, 2022. In Quarries, Ga’s steady, captivating voice entices viewers to traverse a path composed of seemingly disparate shards of conversations, events and fleeting images which, over the duration of the 40 minutes video, accumulate into a mosaic that links the human hand and its tools with the capacity for resistance. We follow the mysteries surrounding prehistoric stone tools from Kenya alongside the neglected labor of stonemasons who paved the streets of Lisbon. The humble gesture of these artisans, stooped over the pavement, morphs into a confrontation with the hubristic act of monument building. For the artist’s brother, the struggle to regain the use of his hands after a serious injury transforms into a narrative about agency in the face of being forgotten, marginalized and deemed of no importance. An out-of-print photography book on Portuguese stone pavements leads to a series of improbable connections. A tour of a neurobiology lab leads to an examination of a Cold War re-education camp where prisoners were forced to dig up stones to create replicas of antiquity while covertly drawing on stone shards to mark and then bury a trace of their stories. In Quarries, Ga extracts stories of resistance from unlikely places and on overlooked surfaces.

Ellie Ga (b. 1976) is a New York City-born artist and writer, living in Lisbon. Her narrative- based videos and performances reflect a passion for multi-disciplinary knowledge exchange told through everyday conversations, poetic sidesteps and obsessive research. Her wide-ranging investigations address pressing social issues, often in unexpected contexts: from the submerged ruins of the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria (Square Octagon Circle, 2013-2014), and the charting of the quotidian in the frozen Arctic Ocean (The Fortunetellers, 2007-2011), to a study of messages in bottles, both as tools for studying oceans currents and as metaphor for exile (Strophe, A Turning, 2017; Gyres 1-3, 2019).

Ga is a recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and Video. Her work Gyres was commissioned for the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Museum solo exhibitions include Gyres, And Other Driftings, The Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, Québec, Canada, 2023; The Fortunetellers, Frac Franche Comté, Besançon, France, 2015; Square, Octagon, Circle, Le Grand Café Centre d’Art Contemporain, Saint-Nazaire, France, 2015; Pharos, M-Museum, Leuven, Belgium, 2014; It Was Restored Again, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York, 2014; Square, Octagon, Circle, Grand Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, 2013. Solo exhibitions at Bureau include Quarries, Bureau, 2022; Strophe, A Turning, 2017; Four Thousand Blocks, 2014; and This Was Later On, 2011. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume, Paris; Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; and the New Museum, New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris, France; Frac Franche-Comté, Besançon, France; Frac Sud, Marseille; The Fluentum Collection, Berlin, Germany; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; The New York Public Library, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She is the author of Square Octagon Circle and North Was Here, both 2018.