Drawing attention to the semiotic processes of world-making in nature, the audio-visual work explores how artists and field biologists go about sensing and making sense of dense forest ecologies of Borneo using new methods that describe entire genetic assemblages as fluid text. The sensory richness of the forest inspired this piece to be a form of music in the way geophilosophy recasts natural selection as musical composition, which binds together the coevolution of a tree, birds, insects and symbiont microorganisms.
Ursula Biemann is an artist, writer, and video essayist based in Zurich, Switzerland. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil and water, as in the recent projects Deep Weather (2013), Forest Law (2014) and Subatlantic (2016). Her earlier work focused on geographies of mobility, including the widely exhibited art and research project Sahara Chronicle on clandestine migration networks. Her video installations are exhibited worldwide in museums as well asat international art biennials in Liverpool, Sharjah, Shanghai, Seville, Istanbul, Montreal, Venice, and Sao Paulo. Additionally, she has held comprehensive solo exhibitions at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; Bildmuseet in Umea, Sweden; the Lentos Museum in Linz; and Helmhaus Zurich. Biemann has an honorary doctorate degree in Humanities granted by the Swedish Umea University and has been awarded the Prix Meret Oppenheim, the Swiss Grand Award for Art.
