Pleasure Prospects
Directors: New Mineral Collective—Emilija Škarnulytė and Tanya Busse
Country: Lithuania and Canada
Duration: 16’’
Year: 2019
Country: Lithuania and Canada
Duration: 16’’
Year: 2019
About the film
New Mineral Collective is the largest and least productive mining company in the world. The company provides counter- prospecting operations and geo-trauma healing therapies at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E and Small Arms. This video installation, Pleasure Prospects, follows the process of acquiring prospecting licenses for alternative values and takes a critical look at “perforated landscapes”—land altered by extractive industries.
Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art with generous support from the Office of Contemporary Art Norway.
About the directors
Situated at the intersection of science, new materialist philosophy, film, and contemporary art, New Mineral Collective are an artist duo formed in 2012 by Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė. Their work questions geography, landscape, ecology, and human relations with nature.
Emilija Škarnulytė is a nomadic visual artist and filmmaker. Blending fiction with documentary, she explores topics from the cosmic and geological to the ecological and political. In her video installations and films Škarnulytė scrutinizes the veil of infrastructure, invisibly regulated by larger systems of power. Škarnulytė looks into core questions undergirding the current geological period, wherein human activity continues to produce worldwide ecological problems. Her works were presented in a number of group exhibitions, including Hyperobjects at Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Moving Stones at the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; the first Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art; and Bold Tendencies, London. She had a solo show at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Škarnulytė was awarded the Future Generation Art Prize 2019 and has represented Lithuania at the XXII Triennale di Milano. Her films have been screened in various film festivals worldwide, and she co-directs Polar Film Lab, a collective for 16mm analogue film practice located in Tromsø, Norway.
Tanya Busse is a visual artist working across the mediums of moving-image, installation and photography. Her practice boasts the synthesis of nature often combined with an industrial, post-human presence. She is interested in deep-time, invisible architecture and how power is produced and articulated through material relationships and histories of place. Her works have been presented in a number of group exhibitions, including Let The River Flow at Office of Contemporary Art, Oslo; the 13th Turku Biennial; and On Circulation at Bergen Kunsthall. She’s had solo shows at Gallery 44: Center for Photography in Toronto; Mumbai Art Room, India; and Podium Gallery, Oslo. She is also the director of Mondo Books, an independent book platform that publishes and distributes printed materials across the circumpolar north.