Dark Ecologies

Ursula Biemann and Timothy Morton | 03.11.2016

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

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He has collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Jeff Bridges, Sabrina Scott, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. He co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. He is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. His work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory at the Critical Theory Institute, University of California, Irvine.