File:Anton Ginzburg Walking The Sea Exhibition Catalogue for Terra Corpus Blaffer Art Museum.jpg

English: Anton Ginzburg: Walking the Sea

Published by Hatje Cantz (2014) ISBN 978-3-7757-3831-6
 Texts by Claudia Schmuckli, Melanie Marino, Olesya Turkina, interview with Dan Graham

A large-scale art project on Aral Sea, published in conjunction with the exhibition Terra Corpus presented at Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston

In Walking the Sea, Anton Ginzburg (*1974 in St. Petersburg) charts a 26,000-square-mile area between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan known as the Aral Sea, an environmental ruin of the Soviet era. Drawing on the tradition of American Land Art from the late sixties and early seventies, Ginzburg approaches the waterless sea as a ready-made earthwork in order to make visible a territory, history, and a potential imaginary space that remain largely inaccessible. The resulting film, photographs, and sculptures refer to regional histories and cultural myths, ranging from the figure of the plein-air painter as a traveling dervish to the idea of the landscape as shaped like an Aeolian harp, and the belief in a subterranean “inner sea” into which the Aral Sea has disappeared. The book pays homage to a rich history of artists who have approached the world from the perspective of a wanderer and who have mapped and reshaped both landscapes and urban environments through the act of walking.