“Living in the middle of this unbroken polar night, this arctic desert, and living with nice other people in a sailboat that can’t sail, I can’t help but turn our life into a series of metaphors for our existence up here of being stuck in the ice.”
 ~ Ellie Ga, (log entry, November 2007, 85˚N)

The “AT THE BEGINNING NORTH WAS HERE” began in 2007 when Ellie was the artist-in-residence aboard TARA for the five final months of its Arctic expedition, which included the last winter of the polar night, the release from the ice and the return to France.

The “AT THE BEGINNING NORTH WAS HERE” is a meditation upon the nature of prediction as it was manifested during the expedition, including ancient forms of fortunetelling, weather forecasting, oceanographic research, and the day-to-day routines of ten people drifting in the Arctic with no control over their immediate future, where there will be next, when they will return home.

For the Hong Kong exhibition, Ellie is going to exhibit three chapters of the “AT THE BEGINNING NORTH WAS HERE”. The three chapters depict different psychological stages of the expedition. agnès b.’s LIBRIARIE GALERIE  is divided into three distinct rooms. By dividing the gallery into three rooms the viewers will have an intimate encounter with the changing psychological states of the expedition through sounds and images.


Ellie Ga and her works
Ellie Ga lives and works in New York. Her projects explore the limits of photographic documentation and span a variety of medium, often incorporating her exploratory writing and culminating in performative lectures, videos and installations. After an artist’s residency in the archives of the Explorers Club in New York, she spent the winter of 2007-2008 as the artist-in-residence aboard the TARA, a scientific expedition in the Arctic Ocean. Her work from the expedition recently exhibited at Galerie du Jour, Paris

Please check out Ellie Ga’s official site http://www.elliega.info/ to see more of her artworks.


About TARA Expedition
“TARA”, a schooner owned by Etienne Bourgois, the son of Agnès b., and CEO of agnès b. brand. “TARA” aims to make contributions on global environmental protection. Since 2004, she has already navigated 6 times to the Arctic Ocean to conduct thorough researches and studies on the geographical and biological environment. Agnès b. fully supports her ecological expeditions, aiming to study the effects of global warming and to arouse people’s attention to our nature.

Agnès b. is the main TARA Expeditions’ partner. Very sensitive to the fate of the planet, she supports the ship’s projects and the latter’s expeditions since her beginnings: “I have committed myself personally in this project which, in 2004, could seem a complete utopia, she says. Finally, it is a remarkable story. Above all, it is a programme that gave progress to science and which will continue this mission with the TARA Oceans expedition. We succeeded to raise the consciousness of several young persons to the environment thanks to TARA’s human and scientific adventures.”

TARA is an out of the ordinary exploration sailboat. Etienne Bourgois has made TARA and its expeditions a thing of legend.

For more information of the TARA Expeditions, please check out her official website www.taraexpeditions.org.