In collaboration with the Center for Visual Culture, Special Collections welcomes artist Ellie Ga to campus virtually (during the current school year) and in person with a residency as soon as that is possible. Ellie looks forward to getting to know the Bryn Mawr community through a series of events, including this upcoming virtual studio visit and screening of Strophe, A Turning.

Conversation with Lisa Saltzman and Madhavi Kale to follow. [This event has been postponed until Spring Semester 2021.]

See our related website about all Ellie Ga related events and activities at Bryn Mawr College. Read our blogpost.

And view Sayed, a work by Ellie Ga, available through the Center for Visual Culture's Virtual VIsual Culture event series.

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Ellie Ga (b. 1976) is an American artist living in Sweden. Her work is included in collections at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Albright-Knox Gallery, and Bard College. Her most recent work, Gyres 1-3 (2019), was a commission for the Whitney Biennial and was reviewed in The New York Times and Artnews. Art historian Tom McDonough (SUNY-Binghamton) wrote about it for the fall 2019 issue of Osmos Magazine.

Ga works between memoir, travelogue, and visual essay connecting ideas and presenting them as multichannel videos or performances with live narration. Her recent film Gyres 1-3 (2019), commissioned for the Whitney Biennial, looks at water as the site of political exile, religious pilgrimage, and forced migration across the Aegean Sea. Her working process is a kind of “beach-combing” that embraces chance encounter with artifacts and how they find their way to her. It involves extended periods of research, including conversations with people in roles, such as museum directors, scholars, Arctic explorers. Her interests are interdisciplinary and cross-temporal. She speaks of her work as a collection of chance encounters, what is lost (and accrued) in translating between spoken and written words, and archaeological discovery.

Ga will be in residence at Bryn Mawr College twice during the 2021-22 academic year. Before then (virtually, during the 2020-21 school year) and during that time, she will meet with various community members as she gets to know Bryn Mawr. She will also comb Special Collections in the process of producing a new work of art, commissioned for the College.