Based on comprehensive research, the artist elaborates in her video works the far-reaching territorial and climatic transformations due to the extraction and engineering of resources, drawing attention to the social and biological micro-dynamics at work in these massive physical encroachments. Her recent fieldwork has taken her to the Amazon and the Arctic region. Engaging with the political ecology of oil, ice and water, the artist interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, SF poetry and academic findings to narrate a changing planetary reality. Discussing her artistic practice in the projects Deep Weather and Forest Law, Biemann particularly raises questions regarding the entanglement of aesthetics, ecology and geopolitics.

About Ursula Biemann

Ursula Biemann is an artist, writer, and video essayist based in Zurich, Switzerland. She investigates global relations under the impact of the accelerated mobility of people, resources and information. In her earlier art and curatorial work she made space and mobility her prime category of analysis, e.g. in the widely exhibited art and research project Sahara Chronicle (2006-2009) on clandestine migration networks. More recently she turned to ecology, oil and water with major art projects including Black Sea Files (2005), Egyptian Chemistry (2012) and Deep Weather (2013). Her video installations are exhibited worldwide in museums and the International Art Biennials of Liverpool, Sharjah, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Sevilla, Istanbul, and Venice. She is founding member of the collaborative art and media project World of Matter. Biemann has a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York (1988). She received a doctor honoris causa in Humanities by the Swedish University Umea and the 2009 Prix Meret Oppenheim, the Swiss Grand Award for Art.