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Ursula Biemann: Geomorphic Video
Geomorphic Video
(p. 31 – 50)

Ursula Biemann

Geomorphic Video

PDF, 20 pages

  • architecture
  • ecology
  • cultural critic
  • art theory
  • aesthetics

My language
English

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English

Ursula Biemann

is an artist, writer, and video essayist based in Zurich, Switzerland. Her artistic practice is research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations where she engages with the political ecologies of forests, oil and water. In her video practice she interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, science fiction poetry and academic findings to narrate a changing planetary reality. Her video installations have been shown at the international art biennials in Istanbul, Liverpool, Sevilla, Shanghai, Gwangju, Montreal, and Venice, and are represented in museums worldwide. In 2013 she had a comprehensive solo exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein n.b.k. In addition to other books, she has published Stuff it – The Video Essay in the Digital Age, and she is founding member of the collaborative art and media project World of Matter. Biemann studied at the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. In 2008 she received a doctor honoris causa in Humanities by the Swedish University Umea, and 2009 the Prix Meret Oppenheim, the Swiss Grand Award for Art. www.geobodies.org
Other texts by Ursula Biemann for DIAPHANES
Jens Andermann (ed.), Lisa Blackmore (ed.), ...: Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape

Entangled with the interconnected logics of coloniality and modernity, the landscape idea has long been a vehicle for ordering human-nature relations. Yet at the same time, it has also constituted a utopian surface onto which to project a space-time ‘beyond’ modernity and capitalism. Amid the advancing techno-capitalization of the living and its spatial supports in transgenic seed monopolies, fracking and deep sea drilling, biopiracy, geo-engineering, aesthetic-activist practices have offered particular kinds of insight into the epistemological, representational, and juridical framings of the natural environment. This book asks in what ways have recent bio and eco-artistic turns moved on from the subject/object ontologies of the landscape-form? Moving from botanical explorations of early modernity, through the legacies of mid-twentieth century landscape design, up to artistic experimental recodings of New World nature in the 1960s and 1970s and to present struggles for environmental rights and against the precarization of the living, the critical essays and visual contributions included in Natura attempt to push thinking past fixed landscape forms through interdisciplinary encounters that encompass analyses of architectural sites and artworks; ecocritical perspectives on literary texts; experimental place-making practices; and the creation of material and visual ecologies that recognise the agency of non-human worlds.