Welcome Ursula Biemann, Matilda Aslizadeh and Alana Bartol!

 On August 10th, we welcomed Ursula Biemann, Matilda Aslizadeh and Alana Bartol to EMMEDIA!

The artists held a collective Q&A discussing their work, overlapping research themes and their perspective as women exploring the mining industry through art. This Q&A was part of our Lines of Descent Screenings. Ursula Biemann shared her films black sea files and Deep Sea Waters; Alana Bartol screened With a finger to her lips and Matilda Aslizadeh is our exhibiting artist showing Moly and Kassandra on August 1st to 30th.

About Ursula Biemann

Ursula Biemann is an artist, author, and video essayist. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations from Greenland to Amazonia, where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil, ice, forests and water.

In her multi-layered videos, the artist interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, SF poetry and academic findings to narrate a changing planetary reality. Biemann’s pluralistic practice spans a range of media including experimental video, interview, text, performance, photography, cartography, props and materials, which converge in formalized spatial installations. Her work also adopts the form of publications, lectures, and curatorial as well as collaborative research projects.

Her earlier writing and experimental video work focused on the gendered dimension of migration. With Black Sea Files (2005) Biemann shifted the primary focus to natural resources and their situated materiality. In 2010 she co-initiated the collaborative World of Matter project on global resource ecologies.

About Matilda Aslizadeh

Matilda Aslizadeh’s media installations and photo-based works are characterized by dense visual surfaces and unexpected juxtapositions drawn from a range of photographic, cinematic, and painterly influences. Deeply invested in exploring the critical potential of immersive spectacle, the ambivalent centrality of storytelling in human existence, and the fluid threshold between documentation and fictionalization, Aslizadeh’s work locates political thinking firmly within affective experience. Her projects have been exhibited internationally in galleries and festivals, including solo exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, AC Institute (New York), and Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, and group exhibitions at the Audain Museum (Whistler) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto. She is based in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the Skwxwú7mesh, Tsleil-Waututh, and xwməθkwəýəm Nations.

About Alana Bartol

Alana Bartol (she/they) comes from a long line of water witches. Their site-responsive artworks explore divination, drawing, and dreaming as ways of understanding across places, species, and bodies, critically engaging with the impacts of extractive industries like coal and oil. Through collaborative and individual works, they examine our relationships with the Earth, the elements, and what are colonially known as natural resources. Long-listed for Canada’s Sobey Art Award in 2019 and 2021, Alana’s practice includes drawing, experimental video, performance, sculpture, participatory art, public art, installation, and curatorial work, presented in exhibitions and festivals across Canada and internationally. Alana is a white settler with Danish, German, English, Irish, and Scottish roots. In 2015, they moved to Mohkinstsis, Treaty 7 territory, (Calgary, Alberta), and began teaching at Alberta University of the Arts.

Thank you to our funders Canada Council for the Arts, Calgary Arts Development and Alberta Foundation for the Arts.