Anaïs Duplan, Hope Ginsburg, Melody Jue, Jennifer Lange
Meditation Ocean (gallery guide)
Wexner Center for the Arts, 2023
Sarah Howard
"Sponge Exchange, Hope Ginsburg" (exhibition text)
University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, 2020
Denise Markonish
"Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder"
(excerpt from catalog essay)
MASS MoCA, 2016
pp. 50–51
Jennifer Lange
"Land Dive Team: Bay of Fundy" (exhibition text)
THE BOX, Wexner Center for the Arts, 2016
Annie Dell'Aria
"Deep Breathing: Annie Dell'Aria on Meditation Ocean"
Artforum, May 2023
Pablo Helguera
"Reading Assignments: Books that artists study, reference, and base works on."
Beautiful Eccentrics
August 18, 2022
Jennifer Lange
Film/Video Studio Journals: Hope Ginsburg
In Practice, Wexner Center for the Arts
Fall 2021
Emma Colón
"5 Artists Bridging Communities Across Difference"
A Blade of Grass Magazine
March 28, 2019
Sydney Cologie and Brynne McGregor
"Wex Moments 2018: Film/Video Studio artist Hope Ginsburg"
(Q&A)
Wexner Center for the Arts
December 26, 2018
Tim Dodson
"Performative Diving Piece Featured at Festival Honoring the James
River"
Richmond Times-Dispatch
June 9, 2018
Jessica Lynne
"From Climate Change to Race Relations, Artists Respond to
Richmond, VA" (review)
Hyperallergic, 2015
Corina L. Apostol and Nato Thompson, Editors
"Making Another World Possible: 10 Creative Time Summits, 10 Global Issues, 100 Art Projects"
Routledge, 2020
pp. 277–278
Amanda Tobin Ripley and Julia Harth
Winter / Spring 2023 Learning Guide
Wexner Center for the Arts, 2023
"Meditation Ocean: How Climate Justice is Explored through Underwater Meditation"
Interview with Hope Ginsburg
Wexner Center for the Arts
June 2024 (Recorded in November 2022)
Land Dive Team: Amphibious James
Television Program is a Production of VPM
Producer/Director: Mason Mills
Producer/Field Director: Allison Benedict
September 22, 2019
Art and Education in the 21st Century
Panelists: John Brown-Executive Director, Windgate Foundation; Tom
Finkelpearl-Commissioner, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs; Hope
Ginsburg-Artist and Educator; Moderator: Geoffrey Cowan- President,
The Annenberg Foundation Trust
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 2014
Cosmopolitical struggles for a pluriversal planet: Projects
Hope Ginsburg
Ginsburg's long-term projects are collaborative, cooperative, and participatory, seeking to build community around learning. For each new project, the artist spends time mastering skills such as beekeeping, vermiculture, scuba diving, wool felt-making, and natural dyeing through informal apprenticeships and skill sharing. Driven by curiosity, Ginsburg aims to challenge institutionalized pedagogy, traditional disciplinary boundaries, and hierarchies of expertise. Her 2014 project Breathing on Land, began when the artist was in residency in Captiva, Florida, working through the memory of a car accident and the healing process that followed, "in an environment where all is quiet, calm and neutrally buoyant (but where peril is potentially lurking a split-second away)"(Ginsburg.)* During this time, Ginsburg was inspired by a group of people meditating on the beach with scuba gear and, working backward from that image, turned her studio into a diving shop that accommodated herself and seven fellow resident artists.**
Breathing on Land uses group meditation with scuba equipment as a site for exploring healing both in the body and of its ecological surroundings. Ginsburg observed about the project that:
The image presents the absurdity of hyper-meditation and suggests a sinister, survivalist impulse in the face of environmental catastrophe. However the practice (of breathing on land with scuba) makes for a kind of assisted meditation. The mild, if not moderate, discomfort of the equipment (its weight, warmth, constraints) keeps the wearer in mind of [their] body. The amplification of each breath becomes a kind of involuntary meditation; it is hard not to 'show up' for each exhalation when an entire apparatus is calling attention to it.
According to the participants, the experience of a room full of people breathing in an amplified chorus created a highly unusual and immersive soundscape. Events of the Land Dive Team have since taken place in Zekreet, Qatar, in Richmond, Virginia, and in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania. During her 2015 solo land dive in a Dukan desert in Qatar, the project summoned the specter of a future ocean, as rising sea levels are clearly a threat in the Arabian Gulf region. In a period of divisiveness regarding the state of the Earth's environment, Breathing on Land focuses attention on the body, its context, and, implicitly, the health of our atmosphere.
Corrections:
*This description refers to the undersea environment where I imagined making an underwater video of the car accident, not the environment of the residency.
**I had an image in my mind of a group of people meditating on land with scuba gear, which prompted the realization of a group of divers meditating on the beach, the first iteration of Breathing on Land (2014).
Corina L. Apostol and Nato Thompson, Editors
"Making Another World Possible: 10 Creative Time Summits, 10 Global Issues, 100 Art Projects"
Routledge, 2020
pp. 277–278