Ellie Ga: The Fortunetellers

About

Ellie Ga’s work develops through long-winded, ambitious projects during which the artist accumulates multiple elements. Documents, photographs, sound or video-graphical recordings, found objects are articulated within different artistic configurations: installations, exhibitions or performances.

Ellie Ga gives equal importance to different types of narratives, thus combining documents and scientific data with history that she builds based on her memory and encounters, blurring the frontiers between reality and fiction.

The Fortunetellers is the project’s title which links together all the works created following the expedition Ellie Ga participated in on the ship Tara in the Arctic Ocean. This scientific expedition had the particularity of being of an uncertain length, since Tara and its crew had a goal of finding themselves stuck in the Arctic ices, drifting until freed by the melting ice.

In the artist’s words, the project is a “meditation upon the nature of prediction as it was manifested during the expedition including ancient forms of fortunetelling, weather forecasting, oceanographic research, and the day-to-day routines of 10 people drifting in the Arctic with no control over their immediate future: where they will be next, when they will return home.”

Two works tied to this project have made their way into the Frac Franche-Comté’s collection in 2014: The Deck of Tara, a card game in which each card is an image linked to the voyage, and a series of four videos representing the trajectory of the research; outlining its labyrinthine form.