Remote Sensing

Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Ursula Biemann’s Remote Sensing (2001), streaming from Wednesday, June 23 through Tuesday, July 6, 2021.

Remote Sensing traces the routes and reasons of women who travel across the globe for work in the sex industry. By using the latest images from NASA satellites, the film investigates the consequences of the US military presence in Southeast Asia as well as European migration politics. This film essay takes an earthly perspective on cross-border circuits where women have emerged as key actors, and links new geographic technologies to the sexualization and displacement of women on a global scale. By revealing how technologies of marginalization affect women in their sexuality, Remote Sensing aspires to displace and resignify the feminine within sexual difference and cultural representation.

Remote Sensing is presented here as one of four films in Part One | Socio-Economic Systems (Hatred for Capitalism), the first of four programs in the online series Me, You, and Everyone We Know: Interrelationality, Alterity, Globalization programmed by Irmgard Emmelhainz for e-flux Video & Film. The series will run in four thematic parts from June 23 through August 18, 2021. Each part will include a two-week group screening, and a live discussion.

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 her recent projects Acoustic Ocean (2018), Forest Law (2014), and Deep Weather (2013). Her earlier work focused on global relations under the impact of the accelerated mobility of people, resources, and information. She is cofounder of World of Matter, an online collective art and media platform on resource geographies. Her video installations are exhibited worldwide in museums and at international art biennials in Liverpool, Sharjah, Shanghai, Sevilla, Istanbul, Montreal, Venice, and Sao Paulo. She has had solo exhibitions at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and Helmhaus Zurich among others. Biemann received the 2009 Prix Meret Oppenheim, the Swiss Grand Award for Art, and a honorary degree in humanities from the Swedish University in Umeå.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.