OPHELIA’S DOMAIN

Sep 27–Nov 02, 2018
Nube Gallery, Santa Cruz

OPHELIA is a site-specific video installation conceived for Nube Gallery, addressing the human-driven destruction of the biosphere and its entanglement with the Anthropocene and gender inequality.

The work emerges from a live performance in San Francisco, where Nadja Verena Marcin immerses herself inside a glass sarcophagus filled with water. Her submerged body invokes layered references: the drowned Ophelia of John Everett Millais (1852), Jeff Koons’s Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985), Daniil Kharms’s The Werld (1939), and the endless circulation of Ophelia memes online. Through these crossings of art history, science, literature, and internet culture, Marcin builds a twenty-first-century Ophelia—haunted, hybrid, and destabilized.

Underwater, wearing a breathing mask, the artist recites fragments of Kharms’s The Werld. Yet her words surface only as streams of air—bubbles rising, breaking, and bursting—rendering communication tragic and inaudible. Distorted echoes and sonic abstractions fill the gallery, creating a soundscape of loss and dissonance that mirrors the impossibility of transparent dialogue in an age of ecological collapse.

The video’s background stages a meticulous quotation of Millais’s iconic Ophelia painting, with Marcin digitally replacing the Victorian figure, constructing an Ophelia of the Anthropocene. This Ophelia is refracted through internet memes, where tragedy is aestheticized, dramatized, and consumed with humor. At once vulnerable and ironic, she embodies humanity’s egocentrism—its self-destructive vanity, its tragic surrender, yet also its fragile hope of protecting the natural world to which it belongs.

OPHELIA collapses myth, performance, and digital circulation into a mirror of our time, where the submerged body becomes both victim and warning, both spectacle and ecological witness.

The solo exhibition was supported by Centro Cultural Simón I. Patiño and NUBE Gallery.