URSULA BIEMANN

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Ursula Biemann, born in 1955, in Zurich, is based in Zurich. She studied first in Mexico, then in New York at SVA and the Whitney ISP (1988). Biemann is an artist, theorist and curator working on the gendered dimension of geopolitical displacement and migrant labor. She initiated the collaborative projects “Kültür/Culture” (1997) on Ýstanbul’s urban politics and “The Maghreb Connection” (2006). Her video essay “Performing the Border” (1999) on globalization processes along the US-Mexico border was followed by “Writing Desire” (2000), “Remote Sensing” (2001), “Europlex” (2003) and “Contained Mobility” (2004). The latest multi-channel video projects include “Black Sea Files” (2005) and “Sahara Chronicle” (2006). Biemann’s 2007 exhibitions include, “This Is My Place”, Kunstverein Hamburg, Zona-B, Tapies Foundation (Barcelona), Peacock Visual Arts (Aberdeen), “Port City”, Arnolfini (Bristol), Moscow Biennial, “The Maghreb Connection”, Townhouse Gallery Cairo and Centre d'Art Contemporain (Geneva), TEK Festival Rome, Thessaoloniki Biennial, FID Marseille, “Devenir Europe”, Centre Suisse (Paris), “Lines of Sight”, ACCA (Las Palmas). www.geobodies.org

Black Sea Files

“Black Sea Files” is a territorial research on the Caspian oil geography: the world’s oldest oil extraction zone. It captures the moment of building a giant new subterranean pipeline traversing the Caucasus and Eastern Turkey that shall pump Caspian crude oil to the West. The line connecting the resource fringe in Baku with the Turkish Mediterranean terminal runs through the video like a central thread. However, the video narrative is not linear one. Circumventing the main players in the region, the attention is turned to a multitude of secondary sceneries. Oil workers, farmers, refugees and prostitutes who live along the pipeline come into profile and contribute to a wider human geography that displaces the singular and powerful signifying practices of oil corporations and oil politicians. The Black Sea basin is known to be a major trading place for female migrants trafficked from post-soviet countries. The flow of capital and resources is closely connected to the movement of people in the region. Drawing on investigatory fieldwork as practiced by anthropologists, journalists and secret intelligence agents, the “Black Sea Files” comment on artistic methods in the field and the ways in which information and visual intelligence is detected, circulated or withheld.